TRUE WIDOW s/t (End Sounds) cd 13.98
Records like this come along so rarely. The sort of record that immediately reveals itself as something so more then just another disc to add to your collection, or the sort of record you play once or twice and then file. The second we heard this, we knew we had to hear more, and hear it over and over and over again. We discovered these guys online, heard a few songs and immediately bought a copy, and then set out to order them for the store (one of us was so obsessed, he even ordered all the records by the True Widow mainman's OLD band).
Not sure what it is exactly about True Widow, it could be that after hundreds of records of rumbling dronemusic and blasting grim buzz and hushed ambient shimmer, that a band that writes songs, incredibly catchy and melodic and heavy songs, is exactly what our ears craved. Not to take anything away from the band, even if we were immersed in straight up pop and heavy rock (which we sort of are also), these guys (and gal) would most definitely shine. This is the sort of music we rarely hear anymore. We originally expected this to be metal, maybe some sort of heavy post rock metal hybrid, and while it is heavy, it's way more indie rock, or maybe slowcore, more like some haunting mix of the two, the guitars are thick and distorted, but not metallic, and they drift into slow drifting creeps as easily as they do pounding majestic roars. Other reviewers have described True Widow as 'sonic noir' and 'stonegaze', both of which are fairly appropriate, it's definitely dark and moody, certainly shoegazey, and a little bit stonery, but it's really just some sort of perfect gloomy heavy postrock. We hear Codeine, Low, Seam, the vibe is laid back and disaffected, weary and washed out, but still somehow completely rocking.
Every song here is practically perfect, and each one segues seamlessly into the next, the sort of record where you don't just remember the melody or the lyrics, but which songs comes next, and how long the pause between songs is, the sound just so hypnotic and mesmerizing, a sort of lyseric doom pop, a druggy post rock, but the thing is, none of that really explains how addictive these songs seem to be. Literally, from the moment we first heard this record, we have not been able to stop listening to it. We've found other reviewers elsewhere who had the same reaction. Which speaks to the power of the songs, so well crafted, brooding, yet incredibly catchy. Just check out opener "Aka", with its strange mesmerizing main riff, the mysterious pause, and then when the band kicks in, it give you chills, and it's 40 seconds into the record.
The second track, "Duelist", is one of the few tracks that features vocals from bassist Nicole Estill, her warm purr draped over big drums and a simple minimal bass throb, before the band launches into a slow burning minor key lope, only to crank up that opening part, infusing it with just a bit more muscle, and peppering the proceedings with a cool woozy chorus. Then there's "Sunday Driver", a gorgeous hazy reverby almost ballad, skeletal guitars, the drums still solid and loud, the vocals laid back and drugged out, the main melody so catchy, and a chorus that kills. Just writing this now, we've skipped back to the beginning of that song 3 times!
This isn't really new, it came out last year, but we only just discovered it, and it had such an impact on us, we figured it was worth sharing with the rest of you. Cuz even if only a fraction of you have the same sort of response to True Widow that we did, it was well worth it. This has immediately leapt to the top of our year end best of list, even though it didn't come out this year, and hell, for some of us, True Widow immediately made it onto our best EVER list. And yeah we know, we traffic in hyperbole a lot around here, we can't help it cuz we love music so much and are excited to turn people on to the music we love, but there's no denying the empirical evidence, we can't seem to listen to anything else but this record. And that doesn't look like it will be changing anytime soon.
Just listen to the sound samples, the first two tracks alone should do the trick. So goddamn good.
On both cd and 2lp, the vinyl version is super deluxe (hence the price, sorry), 180 gram vinyl, full color ultra thick gatefold sleeve, two printed color inserts, pretty fancy, and very limited.
MPEG Stream: "AKA"
MPEG Stream: "Duelist"
MPEG Stream: "Sunday Driver"
MPEG Stream: "Flat Black"

TRUE WIDOW s/t (End Sounds) 2lp 30.00
Records like this come along so rarely. The sort of record that immediately reveals itself as something so more then just another disc to add to your collection, or the sort of record you play once or twice and then file. The second we heard this, we knew we had to hear more, and hear it over and over and over again. We discovered these guys online, heard a few songs and immediately bought a copy, and then set out to order them for the store (one of us was so obsessed, he even ordered all the records by the True Widow mainman's OLD band).
Not sure what it is exactly about True Widow, it could be that after hundreds of records of rumbling dronemusic and blasting grim buzz and hushed ambient shimmer, that a band that writes songs, incredibly catchy and melodic and heavy songs, is exactly what our ears craved. Not to take anything away from the band, even if we were immersed in straight up pop and heavy rock (which we sort of are also), these guys (and gal) would most definitely shine. This is the sort of music we rarely hear anymore. We originally expected this to be metal, maybe some sort of heavy post rock metal hybrid, and while it is heavy, it's way more indie rock, or maybe slowcore, more like some haunting mix of the two, the guitars are thick and distorted, but not metallic, and they drift into slow drifting creeps as easily as they do pounding majestic roars. Other reviewers have described True Widow as 'sonic noir' and 'stonegaze', both of which are fairly appropriate, it's definitely dark and moody, certainly shoegazey, and a little bit stonery, but it's really just some sort of perfect gloomy heavy postrock. We hear Codeine, Low, Seam, the vibe is laid back and disaffected, weary and washed out, but still somehow completely rocking.
Every song here is practically perfect, and each one segues seamlessly into the next, the sort of record where you don't just remember the melody or the lyrics, but which songs comes next, and how long the pause between songs is, the sound just so hypnotic and mesmerizing, a sort of lyseric doom pop, a druggy post rock, but the thing is, none of that really explains how addictive these songs seem to be. Literally, from the moment we first heard this record, we have not been able to stop listening to it. We've found other reviewers elsewhere who had the same reaction. Which speaks to the power of the songs, so well crafted, brooding, yet incredibly catchy. Just check out opener "Aka", with its strange mesmerizing main riff, the mysterious pause, and then when the band kicks in, it give you chills, and it's 40 seconds into the record.
The second track, "Duelist", is one of the few tracks that features vocals from bassist Nicole Estill, her warm purr draped over big drums and a simple minimal bass throb, before the band launches into a slow burning minor key lope, only to crank up that opening part, infusing it with just a bit more muscle, and peppering the proceedings with a cool woozy chorus. Then there's "Sunday Driver", a gorgeous hazy reverby almost ballad, skeletal guitars, the drums still solid and loud, the vocals laid back and drugged out, the main melody so catchy, and a chorus that kills. Just writing this now, we've skipped back to the beginning of that song 3 times!
This isn't really new, it came out last year, but we only just discovered it, and it had such an impact on us, we figured it was worth sharing with the rest of you. Cuz even if only a fraction of you have the same sort of response to True Widow that we did, it was well worth it. This has immediately leapt to the top of our year end best of list, even though it didn't come out this year, and hell, for some of us, True Widow immediately made it onto our best EVER list. And yeah we know, we traffic in hyperbole a lot around here, we can't help it cuz we love music so much and are excited to turn people on to the music we love, but there's no denying the empirical evidence, we can't seem to listen to anything else but this record. And that doesn't look like it will be changing anytime soon.
Just listen to the sound samples, the first two tracks alone should do the trick. So goddamn good.
On both cd and 2lp, the vinyl version is super deluxe (hence the price, sorry), 180 gram vinyl, full color ultra thick gatefold sleeve, two printed color inserts, pretty fancy, and very limited.
MPEG Stream: "AKA"
MPEG Stream: "Duelist"
MPEG Stream: "Sunday Driver"
MPEG Stream: "Flat Black"

JESUS LIZARD Goat (Touch & Go) cd 14.98
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
It's pretty much impossible to pick a favorite Jesus Lizard record, they all rule, ALL of them, even the major label releases, this was a band who were pretty much untouchable. But if we really did have to choose, it would probably have to be Goat. Head is an amazing disc, as is the debut lp Pure, but Goat is where the band finally locked into the sound that would become their trademark, a sound so instantly recognizable, that all you needed to hear was one instrument, and you knew, the crack of the drum, and angular slash of guitar, a weird distorted yowl, it didn't matter, and hell, if you heard em together, well, that was it.
Goat finds the band coming together and almost impossibly transforming into a seriously streamlined rock band, who were as tight as fuck, but simultaneously fucked up and loose and dangerous and chaotic. Due in no small part, as mentioned above, to their very dangerous frontman David Yow. But on Goat is where the power of JL's rhythm section finally became undeniable. The rhythms lurching and lumbering, the drumming insanely of kilter, but managing to still swing, the guitars distorted and crunchy, jagged and sharp, and the songs, how can music this mean and distorted and freaky be so goddamn catchy?
It's really about "Mouthbreather", the big Jesus Lizard hit if there ever was one. From the opening riff, it's the sort of song that would send a crowd into a frenzy, the drum part is beguilingly complicated, and the main hook, the stops and starts, it's relentless and overwhelming but so catchy and of course there's Yow's refrain of "Don't get me wrong, I like him just fine, but he's a mouthbreather". "Then Comes Dudley" is some unholy union of Big Black and Slint, with its low slung bass, big simple motorik drumming, and reedy main guitar melody, not to mention the awesome lurching start/stop bridge. And c'mon, "Seasick"? Has a song ever sounded so much like its title? A woozy, mathy, seasick stumble. And on and on, every track here is a "hit" in some alternate universe where people worship bands like the Jesus Lizard and not shit like the Jonas Brothers. And even to this day, Goat sounds as heavy and harrowing and genius as it did almost 20 years ago. And still better and more musically relevant than about 90 percent of the stuff coming out today. Not to sound like cranky old men on the porch with a shotgun yelling for kids to get off our lawn and for bands to try and write a decent song, but they really just don't make 'em like this anymore.
There are some bonus tracks, singles, live tracks, all new liner notes and let's not forget the amazing projector naked lady cover art!
MPEG Stream: "Mouthbreather"
MPEG Stream: "Then Comes Dudley"
MPEG Stream: "Seasick"

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A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS Exploding Head (Mute) cd 14.98
The return of 'the loudest band in New York' as A Place to Bury Strangers are constantly touted, and it's hard to say, just based on recordings if that's true or not, since generally, the louder a band is, the harder it is to record them and not lose the power that comes with volume. But APTBS's first record was indeed loud, and heavy, and fuzzed out and shoegazey and we totally loved it. Rumor was that this new record ditched much of the volume for more concise songwriting and a focus on melody, which had us a bit worried, but apparently for naught, since the first track "It Is Nothing" is a total amp melting Bailter Space style dream fuzz blowout, looped mantra like vocals, massive washes of blurred guitar, hypnotic drumming, in fact, somehow we ended up listening to that song about 5 times in a row before we bothered going any deeper into the record.
But the rest of the record is just as dense and noisy and heavy and blown out. The same sonic touchstones still apply, Jesus And Mary Chain, Loop, My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3 and especially Bailter Space. The vocals washed out and weary, the drums a solid propulsive pound the bass wiggly and melodic, but a band like this, it's all about the guitars, and they are a monster, seemingly always on the verge of careening out of control, throbbing and buzzing, soaring and screeching, grinding out thick chunks of caustic crunch, or unfurling a gauzy sheet of glimmery haze.
If anything, the new record seems more focused, the first one dipped its toes into all sorts of different sounds and moods, but this one is way more cohesive, the songs all sound like they belong together, albums like the way albums used to be, each song flowing into the next, the sequence sticking in your head as much as the songs themselves, and that too this time around, these songs are pure pop, they may be spikey and jagged on the surface, but the hooks are undeniable, and even the first time through we found ourselves humming bits throughout the day.
Not sure what else to say, other than: this record rules, maybe even more than the first one, anyone into all of the above mentioned noisemakers needs this big time, and who among the aQ faithful can resist a gorgeous chunk of blissed out drone rock shoegaze heaviness? Exactly.
MPEG Stream: "It Is Nothing"
MPEG Stream: "Exploding Head"
MPEG Stream: "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart"

ACCUSED, THE The Curse of Martha Splatterhead (Southern Lord) cd 15.98
If you're like us, and have been fans of The Accused for years and years and years, then this new record on Southern Lord, their first ages, probably poses some serious problems for you. For instance, no one but the original guitarist is still in the band. All new members, including a brand new singer! Which means no Blaine, whose sick vox pretty much defined The Accused for lots of folks. So yeah, how is this possibly still The Accused? Well, to be honest, it still totally sounds like The Accused, and the new singer, is a dead ringer for Blaine, and they sound fucking great, furious, grinding, thrashing super catchy punk metal crunch, the guitars buzzy and abrasive, the drums wild and all over the place, the songs dense and complicated, and the vocals, sick and throat shredding and pretty fucking awesome. Maybe Accused superfans might not be fooled but plenty of other folks would probably not know the difference. And as far as we're concerned, we're just psyched to have another Accused record to blast, and we have indeed been blasting it pretty much nonstop. And the funny thing is, the one person here who was super skeptical about the new Accused, invariably asks what's playing every time this is on, which pretty much says it all. Seriously sick and punked out thrash metal filth from the splatter rock masters!
MPEG Stream: "The Splatterbeast"
MPEG Stream: "Stomped To Death"
MPEG Stream: "Bodies Are Rising"
MPEG Stream: "Festival Of Flesh"

AKATOMBO Unconfirmed Reports (Hand-Held Recordings) cd + dvd-r 11.98
We weren't sure what to expect from this one at all. An oversized sleeve, with Japanese characters adoring the front, as well as the sticker sealing it shut. Inside, a handful of random newspaper clippings, some oversized full color inserts. The work of a Scotsman, who once lived in SF and now lives in Japan, with a previous record released on Colin Newman's (of Wire) label Swim, and this record engineered by one of the guys from legendary Japanese psych rockers Les Rallizes Denudes... No clues at all to what it might actually sound like, but we needn't have worried, as Akatombo traffic in some seriously dark electronic throb, all deep rumbling bass, and minimal drum skitter. A strange hybrid of more modern dubstep, and old school post industrial soundscapery, the mood is ominous and haunting, the melodies minor key and sinister, the beats aren't big, although they are dense and powerful, but the bass most certainly is, we find ourselves cranking the bass on our system, and every track sets the whole house a rumbling. A super thick throbbing low end shock wave of sound, that pulses beneath the muted rhythmic pound, and the strange processed voices, the chopped and looped samples, a swirling, roiling blackened sea of low end, that sprawls and oozes. Fans of stuff like Spectre, Scorn and Muslimgauze will definitely dig, in fact, Akatombo does in some ways sound like a composite of those three. Some Eastern influence here and there, some deep bass dub dynamics, some serious industrial leanings, all woven together into a minimal/maximal songsuite of seriously deep listening blackened chillout music, a smoldering smear of some slow motion dancefloor density. We even hear some Portishead in there too, a little jazziness as well, some Bohren maybe? This is definitely some seriously aQ style electronica, a heavy, murky, lowslung late night blackend drone groove, that is more mood music than dance music, which is generally the way we like it.
Packaged in an oversized printed envelope, each one hand numbered, with multiple inserts, newspaper clippings, as well as a dvd-r featuring three video clips. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
MPEG Stream: "Friend For Hire"
MPEG Stream: "Pragmatism"
MPEG Stream: "Cypher"

BARN OWL The Conjurer (Root Strata) lp 14.98
Barn Owl, the local duo of Jon Porras (aka Elm) and Evan Caminiti (aka Higuma), have always tread a similar path to later era Earth, a sort of blackened twang, Morricone by way of the Melvins, slow motion soundscapes as evocative and slow burning as they are epic and heavy, dark and delicate. With the addition of a drummer, Barn Owl move even closer to their sonic brethren creating a gorgeous songsuite of Western tinged, slow motion psychedelia, dark, dolorous, warm and haunting, heavily reverbed, a sort of dark skeletal doom, rife with warm chordal clusters, gauzy clouds of muted feedback, and epic expanses of effected guitars that sound almost choral.
The mood is both warm and inviting, haunting and tense, emotional and intense. The various bits of steel string guitar are draped over dense swells of roiling downtuned drone, everything wreathed in streaks of high end shimmer, all blurred into a burnished black guitar blur, washed out and hazy, yet surprisingly lush and heavy. The second half of the record gets a bit more Appalachian, with delicate finger picked guitars drifting over deep layered drones, stately melodies unfurling like the black tendrils of smoke from a recently extinguished candle, or the fuzzy fog of late afternoon, painted deep blues and reds by the fading daylight. The record builds to a soaring finale, that revisits that choral sound, and infuses it with an hypnotic ur-drone vibe, like some glorious hybrid of Sunroof! and Arvo Part. Hypnotic and transcendent.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. We got the super limited fancy maroon vinyl mailorder version too. And as you might imagine, these won't be around for long...

BLIND BLAKE Back Biting Bee Blues (Monk) lp 22.00
Ever wonder, why are so many blues guitarists blind? Talk about an occupational hazard. This is the fourth blind blues guitarist the Monk label has featured after Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Perhaps it's the visionary contradiction of their particular affliction, that gives them such an incredible insight into the human condition. Like biblical prophets and ancient oracles, the only ones who 'see' things as they truly are happen to be blind. Blind Blake (not to be confused with the calypso Blind Blake of the fifties) may be the most obscure of the four (at least to us), but he was immensely successful for the Paramount label in the twenties and early thirties. Hailing from Florida, Blake was known for being the "King of Ragtime Guitar", for his unique guitar style that sounded like he was playing ragtime piano using the six strings of the guitar. His technique was so formidable that it has been little copied. Recording at least 79 songs in his incredibly short life span (he died at the age of 40 under mysterious and rumored to be scandalous circumstances), this collection covers 17 of his earliest and most popular recordings and is not to be missed for any fan of vintage blues.

BLO Chapters And Phases: The Complete Albums 1973-1975 (RPM) cd 17.98
Years ago the Strut label wowed us with a collection of tracks from this band from Lagos, Nigeria. The disc was called Phases 1972-1982, touching upon Blo's output from their early psychedelic rock tracks to their later more disco dance stuff. As we put it in our review, first you'll pick up your bong, then put it down and put on your roller skates. Well, that's out of print, but now RPM has released this disc, compiling the band's first two albums, Chapter One from 1973 and Phase II from 1975. It's on the "bong-ier" side of Blo's discography, definitely, their earlier material being quite laidback, stoned, and super fuzzed out, especially the stuff from their first record. The trio of musicians in this group were previously part of the band Salt, formed by drummer Ginger Baker from Cream during his residency in Lagos in the early '70s. Striking out on their own as Blo, they effortlessly melded Afro-beat funk with trippy Western garage psych choogle. Afro-American influences, the likes of both Jimi and the JB's, are certainly heard here also. Wah wah fuzz guitars, sunny melodies, spaced out vocals, and rhythms from hand percussion, clanking chains and bells, all coexist here in blissful grooviness.
If you dig those Sound Way comps like Nigeria Rock Special (on which Blo appear, in fact) or other recent Afro-rock reissues like Ofege and Chrissy Zebby Tembo, you'll probably be into Blo! And, if you already have that out of print Strut collection of Blo stuff we mentioned, it only includes 7 of the 15 tracks here, so if you liked the earlier half of that comp you then need/want this too.
MPEG Stream: "Preacherman"
MPEG Stream: "Beware"
MPEG Stream: "Whole Lot Of Shit"

BUILT TO SPILL There Is No Enemy (Warner Bros.) cd 13.98
Built To Spill manage to pack more memorable guitar licks and irresistible melodies into a single song than most bands manage in their whole career. There Is No Enemy, the latest from these long time aQ faves, is overflowing with that amazing and instantly recognizable Built To Spill sound: twangy, swirly, expansive and super rocking. Doug Marstch's voice is the perfect foil for his amazing indie rock guitar heroics, as it drifts, soars, howls and emotes. BTS are really a band who have not made a single bad record, they are in it for the long haul and they bring a presence to each of their records that manages to make each new outing unique and special. It's kind of awesome that they have never let their music be used in films (as far as we know), as it seems like it would be kind of like cheating for a filmmaker since Built To Spill's songs have such a filmic quality all on their their own. They tap into the human experience in such an honest and nuanced way, always blurring the lines of emotions and perspectives. their songs are never just happy, or sad, or angry, but instead, are a combination of all those things, sounds and songs rife with memories, disappointments, dreams, regrets and hope. It's crazy to think how so many of us have really grown up with Doug Marstch, discovering him in pre-BTS juggernaut Treepeople, and enjoying the genesis of Built To Spill together, when some of us were just teenagers, and later continuing to listen and get so much from the music of BTS all these years later. Martsch really is like the Neil Young of our generation, there is always a phrase, an epic guitar moment, a moving sentiment, a moment of true emotional intensity that sinks deep into your subconscious, in pretty much every Built To Spill song.
There Is No Enemy only gets better, more complex and impactful as the album goes on. Some of the best songs are towards the end of the album, unlike so many other bands who cram their one or two great songs right in the front, and pack the rest with filler, Built To Spill continue to make a career out of crafting one great song after another. We've found ourselves listening to this from beginning to end on headphones as we go through our daily lives, moving from one destination to another, because as always Built To Spill really is the perfect soundtrack to our lives. And once again they've made a totally great record!
MPEG Stream: "Aisle 13"
MPEG Stream: "Things Fall Apart"
MPEG Stream: "Done"

CAMINITI, EVAN Psychic Mud Shrine (Digitalis) cd 13.98
The first proper cd full length release from Evan Caminiti, who is 1/2 of drone duo Barn Owl, along with Jon Porras, who records solo as Elm. It seems like Elm has been cranking them out, but Caminiti has too, we just haven't been able to get his more limited cd-r releases, but we're so happy to finally get this. A dark and brooding psychedelic drone epic. Four tracks, nearly fifty minutes of heavy smoldering droneguitar bliss.
Long blurred chords, arcing streaks of feedback, slowly unfurling minor key melodies, thick blurry buzz smeared into drifting clouds of gauzy shimmer, layered and textured and expansive, the heavier moments remind us a bit of Skullflower or To Blacken The Pages or Fear Falls Burning, albeit with a folkier vibe, more melody infused into the coruscating buzz, while the prettier more delicate moments recall Steven R. Smith, Six Organs Of Admittance and other folkdrone guitarists.
The record drifts into shimmery contemplative twang here and there, evoking the open road, endless moonlit nights, loneliness and heartbreak, the blur of life moving past, the glimmer of reflections set in the endless black of night, but even those moments soon expand into full blown walls of guitardrone, of sheets of feedback melting into smears of high end glimmer. Elsewhere, deep abstract ambience is laced with minimal guitar twang, moaning distant melodies, sitar like buzz, only again to build into an avalanche of crumbling distortion and heart of the sunn soft focus skree, before slipping into a coda of warm, soft meditative buzz, and dreamlike drones. So gorgeous. So recommended for fans of Earth, Six Organs, Steve R. Smith and like minded dronescapers, and of course, if you love Barn Owl and Elm, then this is pretty much essential as well.
MPEG Stream: "Frozen Plains"
MPEG Stream: "Melting Temple / Plumes Of Babylon"

CHALK, ANDREW Vega (Faraway Press) cd 21.00
BACK IN PRINT WITH NEW ARTWORK!! Sometime back in 2005, Andrew Chalk manufactured a tiny edition of what had been rumored to be the soundtrack to a self-produced film entitled Vega. When several journalists published their findings about the magnificent drones housed within that instantly out-of-print cd-r on Brainwashed.com and in The Wire, many of Chalk's die-hard fans were left disappointed at the existence of what might have been one of their favorite Andrew Chalk recordings had they ever had the opportunity to actually hear it.
While Mr. Chalk maintains a very quiet demeanor and hardly ventures into the public eye these days, he's been hard at work ensuring that his recently formed Faraway Press actually keeps up with the orders for the records that he's been recording. Vega is one such record that he so dearly wanted to re-release sooner, had it not been for the inevitability of delays. It's clear to see why delays would have been incurred on the packaging for Vega, as the original cd-r was housed in a filigree of black lace surrounding a paper sleeve, which amounted to a delicate and frustratingly time-consuming process in terms of putting together each cd-r.
As for the music within, Vega is simply stunning. Far more vaporous and free-floating than the previous solo outing The River That Flows Into The Sand and certainly more so than any of the Mirror recordings, Vega acts as an aural narcotic, sedating the listener through a constantly shifting, slow motion churn of chiming guitar drones, almost resembling the kosmische-tinged melancholia heard in the Aeolian String Ensemble's dronescaping. As bleary and amorphous as Chalk's drone-clusters are, he's always had the knack for keeping them just dissonant enough so that they do not fall into the ambient trap of background music. Sublime as ever. Recommended just like all of his other work.
MPEG Stream: "Vega 1"
MPEG Stream: "Vega 3"

CHESNUTT, VIC At The Cut (Constellation) cd 16.98
The music of Vic Chesnutt has always been dark, and dour, and depressive, but there was a time where it was also sort of country, a bit twangy, when he used to have a fiddle player, and be backed up by members of Lambchop. Post twang, he explored a more pop sound, taking that folky bluesy foundation and expanding, and we definitely dug it. Lush and experimental and really pretty. But nothing prepared us for his shift to Constellation, which seemed to tap into his darker side, or darkEST side, his music immediately shifted and became even more harrowing, and emotionally exposed, and the music followed, enlisting members of various Constellation bands to help him flesh out this new sound, and it was most definitely good. Powerful and epic and moving.
At The Cut is Chesnutt's second record for Constellation, and continues to move in the same direction for the most part, beginning with the abject anthem "Coward" with its big distorted guitars, pounding percussion, and soaring strings, not to mention the lyrics. Heavy stuff for sure.
But At The Cut is not all fire and brimstone and damnation, there are some really pretty stripped down acoustic numbers, that remind us of the old days, a poppy jangly jam here and there, but for the most part, this is a distinctly dark and introspective record, with moments of bombast for sure, but just as many of inward reflection, and hushed sonic contemplation. Yet another beautiful missive from a truly tortured musical soul....
MPEG Stream: "Coward"
MPEG Stream: "When The Bottom Fell Out"
MPEG Stream: "We Hovered With Short Wings"

CHESNUTT, VIC At The Cut (Constellation) lp+cd 25.00
The music of Vic Chesnutt has always been dark, and dour, and depressive, but there was a time where it was also sort of country, a bit twangy, when he used to have a fiddle player, and be backed up by members of Lambchop. Post twang, he explored a more pop sound, taking that folky bluesy foundation and expanding, and we definitely dug it. Lush and experimental and really pretty. But nothing prepared us for his shift to Constellation, which seemed to tap into his darker side, or darkEST side, his music immediately shifted and became even more harrowing, and emotionally exposed, and the music followed, enlisting members of various Constellation bands to help him flesh out this new sound, and it was most definitely good. Powerful and epic and moving.
At The Cut is Chesnutt's second record for Constellation, and continues to move in the same direction for the most part, beginning with the abject anthem "Coward" with its big distorted guitars, pounding percussion, and soaring strings, not to mention the lyrics. Heavy stuff for sure.
But At The Cut is not all fire and brimstone and damnation, there are some really pretty stripped down acoustic numbers, that remind us of the old days, a poppy jangly jam here and there, but for the most part, this is a distinctly dark and introspective record, with moments of bombast for sure, but just as many of inward reflection, and hushed sonic contemplation. Yet another beautiful missive from a truly tortured musical soul....
MPEG Stream: "Coward"
MPEG Stream: "When The Bottom Fell Out"
MPEG Stream: "We Hovered With Short Wings"

DE KIFT Yverzucht (Mississippi) lp 12.98
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Another strange cool release from the mighty MISSISSIPPI RECORDS!! Who besides being obsessed with old time country, blues and gospel, also seem to have a thing for European punk rock, a la The Ex, who have had a couple records reissued on Mississippi, and now the label has released on vinyl (of course) the very first record from De Kift, a Dutch ensemble with links to The Ex, and with whom they share some sonic similarities, although De Kift are definitely their own strange and mysterious beast.
The sound of Yverzucht (originally released in 1989) is a blast of classic Dutch crusty punk with a dash of cabaret, jagged and angular and tightly wound, fuzzed out bass, clattery percussion, dark and driving, but also frenzied and wild and over the top. Maybe imagine the Pogues, if they were crusty punks from Holland, jamming out in some crazy squat in the late eighties, and that's basically De Kift. Very cool, and pretty much unlike anything you've heard (except maybe the Ex, a little bit).
Killer packaging too, it is Mississippi after all. Thick vinyl, old looking black and white sleeves, and a printed lyric insert.

DE KIFT s/t (Mississippi) 7" 5.98
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
A companion release to accompany the MISSISSIPPI RECORDS reissue of De Kift's debut full length Yverzucht, this 7" was recorded the year before, and could very well be the first actual De Kift release, as we mentioned in the review of the lp, De kift's sound was classic Dutch crusty punk with a dash of cabaret, jagged and angular and tightly wound, fuzzed out bass, clattery percussion, dark and driving, but also frenzied and wild and over the top. Maybe imagine the Pogues, if they were crusty punks from Holland, jamming out in some crazy squat in the late eighties, and that's basically De Kift. Very cool, and pretty much unlike anything you've heard (except maybe The Ex, a little bit).
The packaging on this is fantastic, a printed 6 panel matte finish sleeve, with drawings and lyrics, the record pressed on nice thick vinyl as well.

DEMDIKE STARE Symbiosis (Modern Love) cd 15.98
If you can imagine a black metal DUB record, released on Chain Reaction, then this debut from Demdike Stare might be just what you're looking for. A collaboration between one half of the group Pendle Coven, and one of the guys who helps run the amazing Finders Keepers label, the duo craft suffocatingly dark drones, and stark skeletal minimal house music, fusing the two into some sort of mysterious rhythmic black beast. The sound dense and dark, grim and frosty, but infused with all sorts of world music elements, Middle Eastern folk, Indian soundtracks, Turkish psych, the result is really hard to pin down, super stark and dubby a la Pole one minute, then lush and Middle Eastern sounding a la Muslimgauze the next, but just as often, something much more spare and harrowing, buzzy and drone-y, and very very very dark.
The record opens with "Suspicious Drone", which is just that, a dense, deep, throbbing chunk of low end rumble, but shot through with undulating synth pulses, and laced with muted effects, before, a super skittery rhythm is introduced, all wreathed in a haze of Goblin-y synth. The second track, "Haxan Dub", is as you might have surmised super dubbed out, spacious and spare, the beats clipped and minimal, until about halfway through when a second beat joins in, creating a strange stuttery offbeat, very darkly groovy. And then there's "Regressor", a super abstract sprawl of rhythmic clicks, echo reverbed ambience, and very little else, bar the occasional synth squiggle or disembodied sample, the result is truly haunting and weirdly gorgeous. And so it goes, the second half of the record is a bit heavier on the world music, with much of the music being made up of chopped and looped samples, or recontextualized motifs, like on "Trapped Dervish, where a fragment of fiddle and a reverb drenched snippet of female vocals, are blurred into a gorgeous expanse of murky rhythmic ambience, but "Haxan" gets all Chain Reaction heroin house-y, while "Conjoined" is all tangled rhythms, and layered drums, until "Ghostly Hardware" finishes things off in appropriately ominous fashion, a long buzzing low end dronescape, all whirring synths, crackling textures, and pulsing bass, never truly locking into a rhythm, instead drifting and floating ghostlike. So good. One of our favorite new electronic records for sure.
MPEG Stream: "Suspicious Drone"
MPEG Stream: "Haxan Dub"
MPEG Stream: "Regressor"

DIDIMAO s/t (Cococonk Records) lp 11.98
Hell yeah! We've been experiencing a pretty rad renaissance in fucked up (in a great way) music coming out of the Bay Area recently. Didimao are for sure way fucked up and that fucked up sound just hits the spot so right on. Dark and spastic, psychedelic and eccentric, creepy and crawling - this is one of those awesome bands that you really can't sum up with one quick line or a single easy reference. But of course it is our job to try, so what we will say, is that they remind us a bit of the really exploratory stuff that came out of the post-punk scene back in the day, you know, like Saccharine Trust or Butthole Surfers as well as nice hints of Nurse With Wound, Mr. Bungle/Secret Chiefs, Silver Daggers, early Boredoms, Faust, Caroliner, Sun City Girls, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle etc. Anyone can be weird and out there, but Didimao have a true psychedelic spirit that really makes this record an awesome tripped out adventure to listen to, moving through so many sonic spaces and exploring each of them in such interesting and organic ways. Their cover of The Urinals "Surfing With The Shah" is taking us to some pretty fucking epic place where punks get hijacked by psychedelic droners which is, for lack of a better word sooooo rad! Makes perfect sense that Didimao used to jam in the same space Wildildlife, the two share a similar disregard for genre and are constantly blurring and melding different styles and sounds. Totally refreshing, confusing and rewarding. This is one fried and fucked up musical missive that we highly recommend!
MPEG Stream: "Fingernails"
MPEG Stream: "Surfing With The Shah"
MPEG Stream: "Pregnant Cop"

EIAFUAWN Birds In The Ground (Pillowscars) lp 17.98
Even though this band is from San Jose, we had to go all the way to Sweden to discover them, not literally of course, but Swedish label Pillowscars were kind enough to turn us on to these guys (this guy actually), and their warm blissy home brewed 4-track dreampop.
Guitars are strummed, harmonics chime, cymbals sizzle, the sound is surprisingly lush, but then again, this record had been in the works on and off for years, amazing what you can do with a 4-track given enough time, the vocals are weary and laid back, plaintive and emotional, gently wrapped up in the swaying jangle and loping tempo, the bass buzzes and growls, the melodies are lilting, pretty, dreamy, total bliss pop for sure, think Animal Collective, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sparklehorse, you know what we're talking about.
The weirdest part is that the man behind Eiafuawn, was a member of legendary hardcore/screamo titans Mohinder! Who knew?
Incredible packaging, thick 180 gram vinyl, and some super striking, gorgeous weird cover art!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!

FACTUMS A Primitive Future (Assophon) lp 16.98
After a record on Siltbreeze, one on Sacred Bones, one on Kill Shaman, and a whole mess of singles, none of which we managed to list somehow, comes this latest full length from Seattle's Factums, a soundtrack (or faux soundtrack perhaps), that takes their gloomy gothic post punk new wave sound and gets it all tangled up with much more soundtracky elements, and it's a pretty killer combo.
So yeah, that sort of post Joy Division, depressive modern retro new wave thing these guys do so well is fully intact, but on A Primitive Future, that sound is surrounded on all sides by experimental interludes, ambient mood music, drones and driftscapes, all appropriately haunting and mysterious and cinematic.
When the band rocks, it's fierce and feral, barked distorted vocals, creepy keyboards, buzzing angular guitars, chaotic drumming, krauty motorik rhythms, darkly new wave-y and dreamily doomy and depressive, but here the band spend much more time sprawling sonically, creating sounds to accompany sights (or so we're meant to believe): shimmering expanses of soft focus hiss over field recordings, haunting stretches of gauzy druggy drift, lo-fi rumbles beneath layers of shifting grit and grime, swirls of malfunctioning music box chimes, deep muted ambient whir, murky sci-fi psychedelic swirl, clouds of abstract deconstructed reverb and detuned guitar and on and on.
Not just another dose of cold wave post punk gloom (although there are moments, instead, a spaced out abstract creepy chunk of brooding, sci-fi, new wave, cinematic ambient doom drift.

FUN YEARS, THE / .CUT FEATURING GIBET Split (Three:Four) 10" 27.00
The return of our favorite (and perhaps the only?) baritone guitar / turntable duo The Fun Years, and another record of warm warbly mystery. Wonderfully warped turntablescapes, looped and crackly and fuzzy, the baritone guitar unfurling spidery melodies while the turntables weave lush gauzy backdrops of sepia sound.
Like past Fun Years records, this one is dreamy and otherworldly, ghostly and sweetly melancholic, the guitar manages to sometimes sound just as crackly and fuzzy as the vinyl on the turntables, the two elements so perfectly intertwined. The Fun Years side builds to a lush crescendo, a warm layered, soaring ur-drone, before slipping back into a slow shimmery outro.
.Cut Featuring Giblet are new to us, a guitar and laptop duo, who are a perfect match for the Fun Years, their sound a haunting elegy, the laptop is super subtle, adding texture and color more than glitch or bleep, gorgeous, creepy, warm and lovely, a slow building gauzy swirl over ghostly drifting guitar figures, eventually reaching a sort of soft cacophony, but even then still floating dreamily from the speakers.
Super limited, only 489 copies, each one hand numbered, and unfortunately super price-y as well, not sure why, but both bands offer up sounds pretty enough that for some folks, it'll definitely be worth it.

GATES OF SLUMBER, THE Hymns Of Blood And Thunder (Rise Above / Metal Blade) cd 14.98
Much as their biggest literary inspiration, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian, rose from mere vagabond thief and freebooter to command armies and then become King, Midwestern underground doom sensations Gates Of Slumber seem to be set unerringly upon the path of glory, treading the jeweled thrones of Earth under their sandaled feet. Bigger labels, more press, they do seem way more popular than when we first encountered their obscure, import-only debut some years back. This new cd release even boasts a slipcase. And while their rise in popularity is well deserved and awesome (couldn't happen to a doomier bunch of guys), it's also a bit of a surprise... who knew that there was such a healthy demand for their brand of true doom? Well there is, and The Gates Of Slumber deliver, overtly influenced as always by old school heavy metal, and metal-related things like weird pulp fiction and Frank Frazetta fantasy artwork (the song "Death Dealer" here is actually ABOUT a Frank Frazetta painting as a matter of fact).
Perhaps the sheer sincerity of these guys won people over. Plus for a heavy band into barbarian muscle-metal, they're remarkably emotional and sensitive seeming, their music often quite melodic and full of gloomy atmosphere. Also, they rock. The one-two punch of opening tracks "Chaos Calling", followed by "Death Dealer", is a bit of a shocker. Were Gates Of Slumber ever this speedy before? They almost sound like High On Fire, or Early Man. A killer NWOBHM/thrash mash. But, then, "Beneath The Eyes Of Mars" slows things down and gets way doomier, more like we were expecting, throwing in some subtle Dr. Who synths to boot, and that's when anyone new to TGOS can begin to appreciate the moody side to this band.
Their long standing allegiance to Saint Vitus is most evident on the Lovecraftian epic "Descent Into Madness" (the longest track here), while elsewhere they get into prog and folk just a bit, no really, there's even some female vocals on the penultimate track "The Mist In The Mourning", shades of Hammers Of Misfortune.
Don't worry, though this album has its acoustic interludes, and all-instrumental tangents, and sad singing and sweet soloing, they sound plenty tough too, ferinstance "The Bringer Of War" is a brute. And you gotta love "Iron Hammer", reprised from an early out of print ep, it's of those songs paying tribute to their influences with lyrics entirely composed of the titles to their favorite classic metal songs and albums.
Further pumped up with solid, Sanford Parker production, this is HEAVY metal that cannot be denied. Maybe we will see 'em on a (metal) magazine cover yet - Decibel did just make this album of the month in their new issue, with a 9/10 rating! And we can certainly see fans of High On Fire and The Sword enjoying this just as much as those into the more underground likes of Reverend Bizarre and Electric Wizard.
MPEG Stream: "Chaos Calling"
MPEG Stream: "Beneath The Eyes Of Mars"
MPEG Stream: "Iron Hammer"

GOSSIP Music For Men (Columbia) cd 10.98
We know that usually people want to keep their favorite bands a bit of a secret, always fearing what would happen if they exploded and became huge and mainstream. But when it comes to the Gossip we really do hope and wish they become HUGE like on the radio/MTV/blasted in malls/bedrooms of teenagers across the globe huge... because they are a band whose message, energy and spirit is so needed in this world. They are the sound of triumph, the relentless spirit of the underdog and outcasts. A reminder that gender roles and traditional views of beauty need to constantly be challenged and their songs have given so many the courage and inspiration to keep on going at the darkest of times. For their major label, Rick Rubin produced debut they have seriously gone for it, and we love the results! Picking up where their great last album Standing In The Way Of Control left off, but for sure adding more electronics, pop and dance elements to their already fiery and rocking sonic disposition.
There really isn't a more charismatic, powerful and soulful frontman or woman around who can top the Gossip's Beth Ditto for dynamic presence and a voice that speaks right to the soul. She is like some amazing amalgamation of Joan Jett, Dolly Parton, Peaches, Kathleen Hannah, Mama Cass, Madonna, Aretha Franklin Missy Elliott, Corin Tucker, and Big Mama Thorton. And while the Gossip are not quite yet the biggest band in the world they are a lot bigger then anyone would have expected back when their first record on Kill Rock Stars was released, after the band members escaped the extreme religious right and homophobic surrounding of their hometown in Arkansas and took the inspiration of the Riot Grrl scene and fled to Olympia, WA in hopes of a better life. It's impossible to quantify the number of people who have been moved and impacted by their music (including several current and past AQ employees). The charged, clean and immediate production on Music For Men suits them very well, as they have always been a band that is about songs that pack a punch and keep you coming back for more and more. How cool it is that instead of airbrushed typical icons (Brittany, Christina, Jessica, etc) kids can hear sounds and read interviews with a large and in charge, queer and proud woman who like all of us, has had her ups and down yet continues to always believe in herself and give hope to all those who hear her songs. An inspiring and potentially crossover record for a band whose presence in the world continues to fill us with powerful positive energy and an undying spirit!
MPEG Stream: "Dimestsore Diamond"
MPEG Stream: "Love Long Distance"
MPEG Stream: "8th Wonder"

GOSSIP Music For Men (Columbia) 2lp 23.00
We know that usually people want to keep their favorite bands a bit of a secret, always fearing what would happen if they exploded and became huge and mainstream. But when it comes to the Gossip we really do hope and wish they become HUGE like on the radio/MTV/blasted in malls/bedrooms of teenagers across the globe huge... because they are a band whose message, energy and spirit is so needed in this world. They are the sound of triumph, the relentless spirit of the underdog and outcasts. A reminder that gender roles and traditional views of beauty need to constantly be challenged and their songs have given so many the courage and inspiration to keep on going at the darkest of times. For their major label, Rick Rubin produced debut they have seriously gone for it, and we love the results! Picking up where their great last album Standing In The Way Of Control left off, but for sure adding more electronics, pop and dance elements to their already fiery and rocking sonic disposition.
There really isn't a more charismatic, powerful and soulful frontman or woman around who can top the Gossip's Beth Ditto for dynamic presence and a voice that speaks right to the soul. She is like some amazing amalgamation of Joan Jett, Dolly Parton, Peaches, Kathleen Hannah, Mama Cass, Madonna, Aretha Franklin Missy Elliott, Corin Tucker, and Big Mama Thorton. And while the Gossip are not quite yet the biggest band in the world they are a lot bigger then anyone would have expected back when their first record on Kill Rock Stars was released, after the band members escaped the extreme religious right and homophobic surrounding of their hometown in Arkansas and took the inspiration of the Riot Grrl scene and fled to Olympia, WA in hopes of a better life. It's impossible to quantify the number of people who have been moved and impacted by their music (including several current and past AQ employees). The charged, clean and immediate production on Music For Men suits them very well, as they have always been a band that is about songs that pack a punch and keep you coming back for more and more. How cool it is that instead of airbrushed typical icons (Brittany, Christina, Jessica, etc) kids can hear sounds and read interviews with a large and in charge, queer and proud woman who like all of us, has had her ups and down yet continues to always believe in herself and give hope to all those who hear her songs. An inspiring and potentially crossover record for a band whose presence in the world continues to fill us with powerful positive energy and an undying spirit!
MPEG Stream: "Dimestsore Diamond"
MPEG Stream: "Love Long Distance"
MPEG Stream: "8th Wonder"

HAMSOKEN Foul Harvest (Looming) cd 9.98
We're always up for some twisted black metal. The more twisted the better. The more fucked up and damaged the better. So on first listen this disc from Hamsoken pretty much hit the spot, beginning with some crumbling sci-fi synths, some growled demonic vox, weird throbbing Goblin like bass, all sprawling bleak industrial blackened synthscape, before lurching into some full on filthy raw blackened pound, all buzzy guitars, and buried vokills, twisted melodic leads, atonal and angular, but then a track later, the fidelity is cranked up a notch, and the band erupt in a frenzy of blasting tremolo guitared black buzz, gnarled and furious and blurry and washed out and so goddamn good.
We were so lost in Hamsoken's buzzy blasting blur that it took us a while before we even realized Hamsoken was in fact Nick Forte, who some of you might remember from hardcore legends Rorschach!! (Who reunited for a few East Coast tours recently, and if all goes well, just might make it out West!).
Even on repeated listens, we don't necessarily hear any Rorschach in the sound of Hamsoken, but like much of our favorite black metal, the fact that Forte is approaching BM from a whole different background, brings so much new to the table, the synths all over the place, the tracks that seem to crumble into slow crawls, the lurching almost SST vibe of some of the guitar parts, the vocals, going from murky garble to super distorted hissy howl, even at its blackest, the sound is weirdly melodic and hypnotic, doomy dirges give way to blazing blasts which in turn dissipate into slow blackened drifts. Unlike most black metal, the bass is huge, and melodic, way up in the mix, sometimes carrying the whole song, and those synths, makes everything sound all creepy and soundtracky and Goblin-y, the best moments are when the metal component is ditched completely in favor of some synth heavy crawl, all processed drum machine, moody moaning guitar melody, and those incredibly harsh vox, moody and melancholy and industrial and heavy, even when it's not heavy in the traditional sense. Those synth heavy tracks play out like some blackened coldwave band, a sound we had sort of been fantasizing about actually, a sort of black metal Cold Cave maybe, in fact, very little of the record is anywhere close to traditionally blasting black metal, those moments do exist, but tend to separate drastically different sonic environments, be they fuzzy and droney and spacey or murky and blown out and abstract, or punky and thrashing and pounding (like a couple tracks, the only real nods to Forte's punk past).
Definitely for folks into the strains of black metal that tend toward the avant, the drone-y, the gloomy, the fucked up, and especially the weird and melodic and new wave-y... wait, is there a strain like that? New wave-y and melodic and fucked up and industrial? Yeah, there is now.
MPEG Stream: "Crypt Of Mine Own Making"
MPEG Stream: "Atrocity Cravings"
MPEG Stream: "Back In The Fold"
MPEG Stream: "Last Rites Of Spring"

HIDDEN CAMERAS Origin: Orphans (Arts & Crafts) lp 16.98
We've been so excited for this one, because when it comes to smart, infectious records that you listen to over and over and memorize every lyric and melody, it doesn't get much better or more rewarding then the Hidden Cameras. Origin: Orphans finds the band with a new level of confidence and definitely displays shows the range they've developed from their trademark peppy and catchy anthem like zingers to more subdued and brooding mopers that unfold with a richness that gives the record a weight and gravitas that we've really been appreciating, borne of song writing and arrangements that are the most fully realized of their career. We're always reminded of John Cale's brilliant album Paris 1919 when we listen to the Hidden Cameras as they tap into the same kind of swirling and infectious melody, which manage to be both sophisticated and so damn pleasing. We also hear nice hints of Arthur Russell, Paul Simon (in a good way!), Magnetic Fields, and Robert Wyatt when he was a young buck back in the day. With all the success Grizzly Bear has received this year, we hope Hidden Cameras get some of that same recognition because they've crafted another of the best pop albums of the year!
And if course, this IS on cd too, but unfortunately our supplier was out of 'em this week, argh. Hopefully we'll have more back on Tuesday, and will list the cd next time around...
MPEG Stream: "In The NA"
MPEG Stream: "Do I Belong?"
MPEG Stream: "The Little Bit"

HURLEY, MICHAEL Parsnip Snips (Mississippi Records) lp 14.98
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
The last Michael Hurley lp, Armchair Boogie, reissued on Mississippi was gone in a flash, so don't hesitate too long on this one. Originally released in 1995 on the Veracity label, Parsnip Snips features homemade archival recordings made between 1965-1972. Sunny and warm, like a long lazy summer weekday in the country with nothing to do but sit on a porch and strum a guitar, Hurley can conjure folk magic through the simplest of means with a down-home at-his-leisure delivery. This is how we like him best, when he's his most laid back spinning humorously surreal tales of love, loss and space-weevils!

JARMAN, DEREK In Conversation. 1979-1980 (The Tapeworm) cassette 8.98
One of two new releases from mysterious UK tape label The Tapeworm. Elsewhere on this list you'll find the blown out psych garage fuzz of the Van Patterson Quartet, and on past lists, The Tapeworm has unleashed limited releases from turntablist Philip Jeck, guitarist Stephen O'Malley, Simon Fisher Turner as well as a truly fascinating reading of works by Jean Baudrillard. This limited edition cassette seems to lean more toward the mood/vibe of the Baudrillard, as it is another all spoken word release, this one a series of 3 recorded interviews with film maker Derek Jarman, recorded in London between 1979 and 1980, originally research for a dissertation, these recordings have remained unheard and unreleased since then.
The conversations are truly fascinating, and Jarman is friendly, affable, funny, discussing, film, sex, the US versus the UK, the underground verus commercial filmmaking, fashion, Malcolm McLaren, the Queen and her fake crown and more. The sound is warm and fuzzy, plenty of surrounding sounds, crackle and random bits of sonic detritus, as well as drop outs and other elements of old tape recordings, but it's all about Jarman and the interviewer, and their funny, relaxed conversations.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES. The cover art features an original drawing by Jarman, given to the interviewer (Richard Torry) as a gift.

JESUS LIZARD Head / Pure (Touch & Go) cd 14.98
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
Head was Jesus Lizard's debut full length, and while perhaps out heart will always belong to Goat, Head is nipping at its heels as THEE definitive Jesus Lizard record, The band had only recently switched from drum machine to love drummer, but the effect was immediate, what was once a throbbing mechanical post industrial noise rock juggernaut, was now something else entirely. Goat seemed to be where everything clicked, but Head was basically almost there, heavy and dense and mathy and now listening to this again, it's easy to see why we all freaked out about this band. The songs are gnarled and grotesque, but at the same time melodic and impossibly catchy, dark and ominous and seriously creepy, but also totally rocking and HEAVY. These guys moved the noise rock bar so high, few that followed could even come close. There's plenty of Slint going on too, hard to say who influenced who, but Albini managed the boards for both. Listen to the sound samples, heck, just buy all four of these reissues, you won't be sorry. And if somehow you've made it this far without ever hearing these guys, you are in for just about the biggest musical epiphany of your life.
As if Head weren't enough, this reissue (and the original cd version) tacks on the Jesus Lizard's first ep, when they were still drummerless, the drum machine, giving the sound a definite Big Black vibe, total Midwestern pigfuck noise rock, Touch And Go, Homestead, AmRep, the hundreds of bands that called those labels home, somehow they all seemed inferior to the Jesus Lizard, maybe they were. The Jesus Lizard defined and refined noise rock and OWNED it. And check out "Bloody Mary", Pure is sonically sometimes so similar to Slint's Tweez it's scary, but it makes sense, that sort of cross pollination is how all these bands were born, some fully formed, some slowly morphing from derivative to original, and very few, like the Jesus Lizard, while borrowing bits and pieces, and definitely influenced by much of what was going on at the time, managed to sound like no one else. And that unique sound definitely existed in one form or another from day one, and just got more and more refined as time went on, without losing any of their ferocity or integrity.
The reissue tacks on some bonus tracks, a killer Chrome cover, and two live tracks, as well as all new liner notes.
MPEG Stream: "One Evening"
MPEG Stream: "S.D.B.J."
MPEG Stream: "Blockbuster"
MPEG Stream: "Bloody Mary"

JESUS LIZARD Liar (Touch & Go) cd 14.98
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
Liar is the band's third record, originally released in 1992. The album begins in classic Jesus Lizard form with the sonic beatdown of "Boilermaker". Exactly as we love them, the band sounds out for blood and just plain mean, despite Yow claiming "I'm calm now", as "calm" is probably the last descriptor that would enter your mind when hearing this song. Up next is "Gladiator", with the monolithic pounding of the rhythm section and bursts of slashing, percussively charged guitar work. It feels like everything in the song is the result of counterintuitive upstroked chords combined with Yow's truly insane screaming and an ending that puts most metal bands to shame in terms of sheer brutality. "Puss" rides wildly with tight as fuck, atonal guitar chords and underlying distorted backing vocals as the bass winds frantically over McNeilly's merciless pounding. In the middle is an awesome, simple Dennison guitar solo before everyone locks back into the evil groove. "Rope" sounds a bit like a manic, Jesus Lizard styled hoedown with its super fast, tight as hell playing, and instrumentation that is both mean sounding and kind of... wacky? Maybe. It's a good 'un no matter how you try to describe it. A demented country influence is also on display with "Zachariah," a slow moving piece that brings to mind all kinds of demented evil that must be looming in David Yow's mind. Closing number "Dancing Naked Ladies" brings Liar to its fever inducing conclusion, with Yow grunting and screeching over the serpentine melodies and rumbling low end.
Like all the Jesus Lizard reissues, Liar comes packed with some tasty bonus cuts (all previously available on Inch, but whatever), including their cover of the Dicks' "Wheelchair Epidemic", a single version of "Dancing Naked Ladies", and demos for "Gladiator" and "Boilermaker". GET THIS NOW!!!
MPEG Stream: "Boilermaker"
MPEG Stream: "Gladiator"
MPEG Stream: "Rope"

JESUS LIZARD Down (Touch & Go) cd 14.98
We love the Jesus Lizard. Hell, who doesn't? But with the band's entire Touch And Go discography now reissued, we're faced with the awkward task of reviewing records that are so ingrained in our minds that we're almost at a loss for words. What exactly do you say about albums that are pretty much beyond any sort of criticism? Well, first of all, we can tell you that these Albini/Weston remasters sound better than EVER, and if for some freakish reason you missed out the first time around, or maybe you were just too young, GET THESE NOW!!! And to those with worn out copies of these essential albums, likewise, GET THESE NOW!!! The best thing about re-examining these discs, however, is the fact that the Jesus Lizard sound as powerful, menacing, and balls out INSANE as they always did and always will. There's no further need to approach the Jesus Lizard discography with some bullshit pseudo-intellectual attempt to place this band within a certain point in history (which is not to downplay their significance within time or place by any means, duh). Instead, you can simply bask in the furious glow of one of the best rock bands of the last 25 years (at the very least)!!! Still, as record purveyors, we feel it necessary to dish out a brief description before talking about the albums individually.
Shit. Where do you begin when describing this band? David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, on bass and drums respectively, are one of the tightest and most intimidating rhythm sections in the history of indie rock (which, honestly, is probably not the best genre to lump a band like the Jesus Lizard in, but it sure is better than calling them a "pigfuck" band). On pretty much every song, Sims and McNeilly sound like they're walking you through the soundtrack to your potential murder, a quality that is only enhanced by David Yow's completely unhinged vocals. And what do you say about a guy like David Yow? He is without precedent and totally peerless, his crazed delivery and bizarre lyrics were the perfect ingredient to make the Jesus Lizard one of the best and most unique bands to ever walk the earth. Oh, but then we certainly can't forget the band's brilliant guitarist, the legendary Duane Denison, whose unique, super trebly guitar playing slashed alongside the band's muscular rhythm section like a rusty, disease-ridden knife. The Jesus Lizard are indeed one of those bands where every member was equally essential in bringing forth their amazing trademark sound.
1994's Down was the band's final record for Touch And Go before jumping ship to Capitol a year later. Despite its status as most peoples' least favorite of their Touch And Go albums (which certain aQ staffers will disagree with on every level), the band stills tears shit up relentlessly and mercilessly. Opener "Fly On The Wall" retains a lumbering, pounding groove with Denison's appropriately insect-like guitar buzzing all over the place as Yow tells the tale of his spiraling insanity caused by the titular character. Throw in a chorus that is the noise rock equivalent of a massive heart attack, and you know the Jesus Lizard mean business. The manic rocker "Queen For A Day" storms out like an evil, bluesy tornado, with Dennison shredding out some amazing noisy guitar solos over the ominous throb of Sims and McNeilly. All the while, a manic Yow screams out his hilariously frightening, creepy as fuck lyrics that manage to reference Dante's Inferno. Woah. The melodically charged "Destroy Before Reading" makes use of awesome sustained, droney chords and a steady rhythmic flow, and is sort of like journeying through a surreal dream in the darkest corners of Yow's crazed brain, as he spits out choice lyrics like "Mingus and Parker fuck for breakfast / cause jazz is a slut again." Right. Fucking. On. Melancholy instrumental "Low Rider" (enhanced by some maniacal Yow screams at all the appropriate moments) creaks and sways with bits of chorus inflected guitar and bass, serving as a perfect interlude to separate the album's two halves. "Horse" pummels at a steady rhythm with a cool underwater organ moving hazily under the band's nihilistic dirges, while the spacious, slow moving "Elegy" is surprisingly melodic and - gasp! - kinda "beautiful", even as Yow verbally defiles your rotting corpse with the barely composed delivery of a serial killer.
So yeah, wherever Down may rate in the canon of the Jesus Lizard to some folks, we're all for it on every conceivable level. This reissue also also includes the amazing single versions (all made available on Inch, but whatever) of the songs "White Hole", "Glamorous", and "Deaf As A Bat", as well as "Panic In Cicero" from the Clerks soundtrack. Hopefully others will give this album the listen it deserves, because there really is everything that's great about this band on full display, if you ask us. GET THIS NOW!!!
MPEG Stream: "Fly On The Wall"
MPEG Stream: "Queen For A Day"
MPEG Stream: "Destroy Before Reading"

KIRBY, LEYLAND When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart: Part Two (History Always Favours The Winners) 2lp 26.00
Volume two of this sprawling 6lp (two lps in each volume) drone haze ambient masterpiece from the man behind the Caretaker, and V/VM!
For a couple of years now, Leyland James Kirby has been releasing a highly acclaimed catalog of maudlin ambient recordings culled from melodic phrases looped and blurred from old 78s. The bulk of these recordings (typically released under the Caretaker moniker) didn't seem to leave England or at least they didn't arrive in California. Now that the distribution has improved, we've finally been able to hear what the fuss has been all about. This double lp is the second in a trilogy called Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was, and finds Kirby now living under the grey skies of Berlin having relocated from grey skied Manchester; lo and behold, he's still making cold, rainy grey music for cold, rainy days. And yeah, he's pretty damn good at it.
Like the first volume, When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die, Memories Live Longer Than Dreams also eschews titles and doesn't even give us any information what so ever on the artwork, a paint-smeared canvas. It works as an endless loop of flipping the two records, forgetting which track you've drifted in and out of, and wondering where to start next. These pieces of blurred ambience, obfuscated field recordings, and sad piano melodies hint at the furniture music of Erik Satie, the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti, and the emotional resonance of William Basinski. Limited to 450 copies, these will not last. However, we have been told that a 3cd set will be emerging at sometime in the future containing the whole vinyl trilogy.

LAY, JOSH True Mask (Small Doses) cd 13.98
It all started with Poison Drinker, Josh Lay's last full length, a noise record that managed to be both noisy and melodic, harsh and pummeling, but also weirdly listenable, and kinda pretty. We're pretty particular when it comes to noise records, so for that record to kick our asses so hard, something special was definitely going on, which was confirmed with the super limited Worm Terrain cassette. Now we've got Lay's first proper cd full length, and while definitely still noisy, it's even more removed from traditional 'noise music'. Sure there are several serious bursts of harsh grinding NOISE, but here, those parts almost sound more black metal, with distorted hellish vox, over swirling sheets of sound. But those moments are actually few and far between. The first half of the title track is all synthy and sci-fi, droney and abstract, a looped electronic soundscape that eventually does splinter into some blackened noise, but the second track pulls the sound back from the edge, weird angular riffs buried beneath a sea of glitches and trills, that riff is the anchor of the song, chugging away relentlessly beneath a endlessly churning and ever shifting field of glitched out hiss, and some more of those sinister vokills.
But as the record progresses, it gets less and less noisy, and more and more abstract and a tiny bit prettier. Track three is a high end sprawl of looped glistening skree and throbbing rhythmic bass pulses, minimal vokillizing, a swirling sea of streaked trebly blur, and then the final track, which is perhaps still technically noisy, but that noise is blunted, muted, dulled, like some churning blackened sonic sea, a throbbing industrial dronescape, a little Wolf Eyes, but way less abject, and weirdly a little bit warmer sounding, still ominous and buzzy, but again, strangely soothing and almost serene.
MPEG Stream: "Behind The Mask"
MPEG Stream: "Human Skin"

MELVINS Chicken Switch (Ipecac) cd 16.98
Ah, the mighty Melvins, we've been into 'em for longer than we care to admit (put it this way, some of you reading this weren't yet born when we were first freaking out over the absurd heaviness of Ozma). They can do no wrong, or when they do "wrong" it's 'cause they meant to (i.e. Prick). Fans know that the Melvins don't need any help from anybody when it comes to making fucked up sounds. Pretty much every album of theirs has got at least totally WTF? track on it. They even have a few ENTIRE albums that confusionally consist of nothing but, such as the aforementioned Prick. So, imagine if the Melvins DID get some help, or rather, don't imagine, listen to this new all-remix album and hear for yourself! That's right, what could be cooler than the Melvins? How 'bout the Melvins screwed and chopped (if only! they should have gotten Swishahouse involved) by a bunch of other extreme/avant music mavens? Check it out: Eye Yamatsuka, Christoph Heemann, V/VM, John Duncan, Matmos, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, David Scott Stone, Panacea, Sunroof!, Kawabata Makoto, farmersmanual, Void Manes, RLW, and $peedranch! Dunno who Void Manes is (sounds black metal) but the rest of 'em are well known experimental/electronic/noise artists you're probably all familiar with. Not sure if the Melvins themselves picked 'em, or Ipecac did, but it's an impressive roster, just the folks to remix the Melvins catalog in gonzo, Plunderphonics fashion. No, these aren't "normal" remixes. Rather than having just a single song to play with, the participants were apparently asked to take a whole Melvins album and turn it into their "own" track.
Maybe you're wondering, is this noisy? Yes. Starts off that way certainly with Eye from the Boredoms' "Washmachine Sk8tronics". Endlessly chugging guitar riffage, gobs of distortion and shrill garbled electronics. Good grief, by the time you get to the end, which brings in the sounds of skateboards, it's hard to imagine who among the other remixers could top this, or how. Cleverly, the next track takes a totally different tack, Christoph Heemann's quietly droning "Emperor Twaddle Remix" being an abstract and (mostly) lovely respite from the noisy shenanigans that start up again on the very next cut, V/VM's "She Chokes Her Dying Breath & Does It In My Face", which proves that anything current noiseniks like Wolf Eyes and Shit & Shine ever did, the Melvins did it first, provided you listen to 'em with the assistance of V/VM. This sounds more like Merzbow than the latter track remixed by Merzbow himself, whose contribution to this disc is equally distortodelic but perhaps more rhythmic.
That brings us to track 4, the aforementioned John Duncan mix, which for the first time on this disc sounds like could actually be something from an actual Melvins album. With a heavy percussive onslaught and droning guitar, it's like an extended intro to a real Melvins song, but then when you think the rock is gonna kick in, instead you get low-end heartbeat pulsations and high-end electronic sizzle. Again, whomever programmed this disc did a fine job, 'cause that segues quite nicely into the clicks and cuts techno makeover that the Matmos boys do for the Melvins on "Linkshander". Heck we all might like techno better if it ALWAYS had the ominous doom-drone thing going on in the background, and spacey sci-fi effects, that this track does.
Lee Ranaldo's "Eggnog Trilogy" starts off with the first easily recognizable Melvins material on here so far, including even snippets of Buzz's vocals. This takes over from Duncan's cut as the track that sounds the most like it could be the Melvins themselves, but at the same time clearly isn't entirely. And, gosh, there's plenty more highlights, we'll not describe them all, except to say that Panacea's "electroclash" remix indeed sounds like that (rad!), and Sunroof! succeed in transmuting the Melvins into something that sounds more like their own hazy shining dronemusick, lovely.
Most of the remixers delve into the realm of digital glitch and out-and-out noise, with a small minority opting instead for calm and quiet. Tape speed manipulation, pitch shifting, extreme distortion, sudden edits, that's mostly the modus operandi here and the Melvins can take it, somehow keeping their unique musical persona intact. Though it will be challenging, trainspotting Melvins fanatics can have good fun trying to figure out what songs and/or albums each track is plundering.
Lastly, we can't review this without mentioning that a good friend of ours first heard the John Duncan remix while riding in a Lamborghini speeding through the Italian Alps -with- John Duncan. How cool and/or strange is that? While you might not be listening to this in a luxury sports car, more likely in your own home, we're sure you'll get a big kick out of it too, along with all the other remixes...
MPEG Stream: "Washmachine Sk8tronics (Remixed By Eye Yamatsuka)"
MPEG Stream: "Linkshander (Remixed By Matmos)"
MPEG Stream: "EggNog Trilogy: I) She's Ivanhoe, II) Cancer, III) Inebriated (Remixed By Lee Ranaldo)"

MERCEDES HELL Kingdom Together (Full Contact / Ektro) 7" 7.98
Another 7" slab of New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal weirdness from our pals in Circle. We're pretty sure it's them, it must be, that's Jussi on the cover with his hair in his face, posing in front of a dilapidated barn, and it sounds just like all the other NWOFHM acts they've invented that we so enjoy, like Steel Mammoth and Krypt Axeripper and Tractor Pulling and Motorspandex! And also quite a bit like Circle's own Katapult album come to think of it.
Bright burbling yet somehow metallic guitar riffage churns forth, amidst a warm swarm of distortion and synthy sounding FX. It's a lofi, catchy quasi-metal pop music, head bobbing if not banging, perfect for the rasping vocals crooning cryptic stoner hippie/hessian poetry: "One way road / down from the hills / straight to the cave of skulls / computer of yesterday" Huh? Or: "Stay with the rainbow / eat the dreams / burn the talent / fight the spirit / listen to soul". Brilliant.
And although this isn't black metal by a long shot, despite its Scandinavian origins, they did come up with one of the truly grimmest song titles ever: "We're Getting Old"! There's four songs here, 2 per side, the other titles being "Let's Eat Fire", "Agitation Evil", and "Kingdom Together".
Wonder if this band will someday do a full-length or if, as with most of their NWOFHM comrades, one 7" is all we get. Based on this, we'd be happy to hear more. Or, just more from the next new "band" these guys come up with!

MISSISSIPPI SHEIKS Sitting On Top Of The World (Monk) lp 22.00
One of the more short-lived but highly prolific country string groups, the Mississippi Sheiks formed in 1930 and disbanded six years later after recording over 60 songs including their huge crossover hit, "Sitting On Top Of The World" (covered by Sinatra, Dylan, and Cream amongst many others!). Naming themselves after Rudolph Valentino's movie, The Sheik, the trio were known for the risque double entendre in their songs ("Driving That Thing" "Cracking Them Things", "Grinding Old Fool"), making them a highly successful touring and party band. The wonderful vinyl-only Monk label does it again, compiling the best of the Sheiks' early Okeh recordings from 1930, including their other well-known song,"Stop and Listen Blues"!

MUM Sing Along To Songs You Don't Know (Euphone) cd 14.98
When Mum first hit the scene, they were part of that amazing Morr Music scene, when that label was releasing dreamy and delicate electronic tinged pop that soared and melted with such ease and lasting impact.
Mum were really one of the best of the bunch, an Icelandic group who excelled in making sounds that sounded more like a magical music box than a regular old rock band. Several years later and much has changed, Morr Music is no longer the quite so dependable label they once were and Mum have found themselves on several labels since those early days, as well as going through some major lineup changes, all of which resulted in a pretty serious shift in sound on their last record, Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy.
Their evolution of sound continues as they move more towards a much more full sound rife with rich and lush instrumentation as well as a delicate use of electronics, which they use much less frequently than on their earlier recordings, but when they do, they really find simple and engaging ways to make it sound magical. Much of the full and lush sound can be attributed to cellist Hildur Gudnadottir who has helped flesh out the groups sound since joining the group as a full member. While so many records tend to be front loaded we actually find that Sing Along To Songs You Don't Know gets better and better as the record goes on with many of its best moments found on the second half of the album. SO perfect for the crisp and cold days to come...
MPEG Stream: "Illuminated"
MPEG Stream: "The Smell Of Today Is Sweet Like Breast Milk In The Wind"
MPEG Stream: "A River Don't Stop To Breathe"

NO BALLS (BRAINBOMBS) s/t (Diskad) 7" 12.98
Okay, c'mon, the band is called No Balls, it's one of the guys from the mother fucking Brainbombs, and he's doing some sort of damaged lo-fi super distorted, doomy, looped, hypnotic, lo-fi metallic krautpunk. What more do you need to know?!
All of the basic BB elements are present, except maybe the trumpet, or the vocals. Which means two blasts of all instrumental hypnofuzz dirgery. The A side is all downtuned and fuzzed out and Sabbathy and way doomy, with a killer main riff, the whole thing simple and stripped down and plodding, but with some awesome (and awesomely freaked out) strangled stumbling angular guitar counterpoint, some serious Black Flagged, Greg Ginn-ed six string super distorto gnarl. Noisy and chaotic and fragmented, while that main riff just goes gloriously on and on and on and on...
The B side offers up another locked and looped riff, this time lumbering along beneath a super distorted wall of crumbling sound, the rhythm motorik and sort of abstract, while over the top ANOTHER guitar, dense and downtuned unfurls a buzz drenched slow motion minor key melody, while very much like the A side, that original riff pounds away unwaveringly.
So awesome. Bummer that it's so limited, only 187 copies, we got almost a quarter of those, but they're already flying. Simple orange and blue hand numbered silkscreened covers, on thick orange vinyl with hand stamped labels.

ON Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night (Type) cd 15.98
On, not to be confused with the mysterious New Zealand mindfuck punk band of the same name previously released on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, is a collaboration between French composer Sylvain Chaveau and percussionist Steven Hess of Pan American and Haptic. But then built into the concept of their collaboration, the recordings they make together are then handed off to a third party, this time around to the one and only Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, to be "remixed", for the lack of a better description, and thus we have Your Naked Ghost Come Back at Night. Like much of the dark and trembling chill of many Type releases from Svarte Greiner and Xela, listening to the blurred spectral ambience of On's sound, it is nearly impossible to distinguish the original source material from Sten's treatments. We can only know the ghosts. Originally recorded in 2003 with a limited release in 2004 on the Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'Acier label, Type has fittingly reissued this unique release which in all but name is pretty much the final Deathprod release as Sten has vowed never to record under that name again! Like all of Type's releases, the vinyl is limited so act fast!
MPEG Stream: "Your Naked Ghost Comes Back at Night and Flies Around My Bed"
MPEG Stream: "In The Forest of The Night"
MPEG Stream: "Too Many Demons Still Haunt This Land"

ON Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night (Type) lp 23.00
On, not to be confused with the mysterious New Zealand mindfuck punk band of the same name previously released on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, is a collaboration between French composer Sylvain Chaveau and percussionist Steven Hess of Pan American and Haptic. But then built into the concept of their collaboration, the recordings they make together are then handed off to a third party, this time around to the one and only Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, to be "remixed", for the lack of a better description, and thus we have Your Naked Ghost Come Back at Night. Like much of the dark and trembling chill of many Type releases from Svarte Greiner and Xela, listening to the blurred spectral ambience of On's sound, it is nearly impossible to distinguish the original source material from Sten's treatments. We can only know the ghosts. Originally recorded in 2003 with a limited release in 2004 on the Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'Acier label, Type has fittingly reissued this unique release which in all but name is pretty much the final Deathprod release as Sten has vowed never to record under that name again! Like all of Type's releases, the vinyl is limited so act fast!
MPEG Stream: "Your Naked Ghost Comes Back at Night and Flies Around My Bed"
MPEG Stream: "In The Forest of The Night"
MPEG Stream: "Too Many Demons Still Haunt This Land"

PSYCHIC REALITY Omni (s/r) cd-r 7.98
A haunting, damaged and enchanting new musical endeavor/state of mind from local soundstress Leyna Noel. Using primitive and crumbling electronics, distorted murky guitar and captivating vocals, Noel taps into a very fuzzy, buzzy, witchy and sonically rewarding state of sound. The opening track "Omni" is noisy and deliciously disturbing, roaming in a territory similar to early Pocahaunted and recent Inca Ore, although the true show stopper is the next track which is a completely breathtaking adaptation of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come", here transformed into something that sounds both so modern yet timeless, spellbinding, hypnotic endearing. While her vocals are buried beneath many layers, the secret weapon and what really sets this apart from so many other like-minded warped/bedroom creations is that Leyna really does possess such an amazing and powerful voice, an instrument that she channels into a truly dense and tripped out atmosphere. Just under 15 minutes of music but a totally great introduction to what is no doubt just the beginning of what will be a long journey for Psychic Reality. Imagine what could happen if Grouper, Kuupuu and The Skaters joined forces and begin to get a glimpse into the exciting otherworld that Psychic Reality inhabits.
There is also a new Psychic Reality cassette that we have in called Real/Chic that we hope to list next time but they might not last long so might be smart and grab one of those now as well.
MPEG Stream: "Change"
MPEG Stream: "Omni"

SANDOVAL, HOPE & THE WARM INVENTIONS Bavarian Fruit Bread (Nettwerk) cd 13.98
Last list out we made Hope Sandoval's first record in over eight years our Record Of The Week. That record was in fact the follow up to this, her first full length after the dissolution of Mazzy Star, who clearly were one of the most important and influential bands of the '90s. Sadly this record had been out of print for years, but with the release of her breathtaking new record, Bavarian Fruit Bread has finally been reissued and that's beyond good news, as this is pretty much the pinnacle for hazy, dazed out and dreamy songsmithery, a suite of sound that both lulls and caresses, transporting you to a place that is somewhere between the clouds, the fog and that half awake/half asleep hypnogogic state. In fact we know a few people who have had some really amazing/healing moments with this record during a period of infirmity and under heavy medication, the perfect soundtrack, as if it were designed to play over and over and give such hazy relief, a glorious sonic painkiller, musical codeine, the kind of record that takes you to a beautifully numb and comforting place. We also plenty of folks who cite this as their absolute go to 'make-out' record, which makes perfect sense, as every note is permeated by a smoky sensuality that truly is intoxicating. If you missed this the first time around we can't stress enough what a stunning and achingly beautiful record this is. An absolute must have!
MPEG Stream: "Suzanne"
MPEG Stream: "Feeling of Gaze"
MPEG Stream: "Butterfly Mornings"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Wayward Set (Human Faculties) cd-r 8.98
Fantastic drones found here! Seattle's Matt Shoemaker has been quietly making some of the best dronemusik over the past decade with little to no aplomb whatsoever. He hybridizes field recordings, modular synthesis, speaker / feedback constructions, psychedelic colorations, and minimalist stasis into forms which grow, twist, and evolve throughout his work. The last album we heard from Shoemaker was his far more tripped out, post-Kosmische zoner album Erosion Of The Analogous Eye; but this live set recorded at the Good Shepherd Chapel in Seattle harkens more to his earlier albums Spots In The Sun and Warung Elusion, which manipulated field recordings into disquieting, grotesque (in his own words) passages of cinematic sound design. Upon introducing an undulating web of sustained tones woven into complex harmonic phrases, dissonant bellows, and lulling hypnosis, Shoemaker gradually introduces a revolving set of field recordings into his mix. At first the tussle and rumble of leaves, mulch, and sticks in the forest give way to a percolating chorus of frogs, probably originating from the Brazilian rain forests given Shoemaker's excursion into the forest through a residency guided by Francisco Lopez. He then embarks upon a slow descension of his magnetic drones into ominous clouds of static and ghostly reflections of grey noise, arching these sounds through harrowing turns as if he were piloting an airplane through that aforementioned rainforest trying not to crash into a cliff obscured by clouds. This is eerie, hallucinatory music for sure, and this release is strictly limited to 100 copies. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Wayward Set (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "Wayward Set (excerpt 2)"

SPARKLEHORSE + FENNESZ In The Fishtank 15 (Konkurrent) cd 14.98
It seems like such a perfect match up, such a great idea, it's a wonder it didn't happen sooner. The gauzy murky dream folk of Sparklehorse, and the fuzzy pixelated hazescapes of Christian Fennesz, just imagine how great they would sound together, and you'd be right. Sparklehorse records already sound like they were produced by Fennesz, so if anything, this collaboration just pushes the sound even further. Apparently it was Fennesz' idea to get together with Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse for an In The Fishtank session, a long running series that pairs likeminded musicians, gives them two days in a studio together and releases the result. And we have to say, as much as we love many of the Fishtank releases, this one might just be our favorite yet. And how could it not be, the whole session is a series of washed out melodies and barely there song fragments, of hushed dream pop, and spaced out chamber ambience, of drifting dronescapes and haunting cinematic shimmer.
Because the two conjure up such similar sonics, it's hard really to pick out who's doing what here, but that's not the point, the two meld into one, creating a gorgeous organic whole, softened notes, distant melodies, lush layered mysteries, guitars unwind lazily, Linkous' vocals are plaintive and keening, always on the verge of cracking, made even more poignant as they are suspended in clouds of minor key blur, and squalls of softly pixelated sound. Throw some headphones on, and suddenly it's like looking at this fuzzy ambient pop through a microscope, the vocals are looped and chopped and layered and turned inside out, not audible on the stereo, but up close, a kaleidoscope of colors and textures.
All of those bands who try to do that 'regular old pop made special by adding a little electronic glitch' need to bow down before these masters. Two days together and they're able to create something magical, that yes is a blend of folk and rock and electronics, but it's so much more, every facet is linked to every other, all of the elements are inexorably linked, seeping into the sounds around them, bleeding into each other, it's not just a pop song dipped in some computery glitch, the glitch here and the digital element is subtle and lush and as organic as any of the guitars or voices.
A few of the tracks get noisy and thick and corrosive and almost explosive here and there, but even then, that crunch and buzz is underpinned by swirling melodies, and lush hushed drones.
Such a beautiful beautiful record, hard to believe it was conjured up in only a matter of days. It makes us almost wish these two keep making music together, imagine what they could come up with given a week? A month? A year? Here's hoping...
MPEG Stream: "Music Box Of Snakes"
MPEG Stream: "Goodnight Sweetheart"
MPEG Stream: "If My Heart"

SPIRACLE Ananta (The Helen Scarsdale Agency) 2cd 16.98
We missed out completely on the Ananta cd-r that Spiracle first released through the Mystery Sea label a few years back. It was limited to 100 copies and quickly disappeared, much to our chagrin. Fortunately, Helen Scarsdale in her sage wisdom has just reissued that static drone opus with a second disc that reworks the original material while keeping the same intent.
Hitoshi Kojo is man behind Spiracle, having wandered from his native Japan to Central Europe where he's been collaborating with the likes of Michael Northam, Maurizio Bianchi, John Grzinich, and Murmer. Much of his work deals with acoustic drone construction, with some of his records taking up the mantle of beautiful tactile noises like those generated by Organum, Jonathan Coleclough, and Andrew Chalk. Ananta, now presented as a double disc, is an album with a purpose; or at least it has a purpose for Kojo as he's one who has trouble falling asleep. So he composed this album as a narcotizing agent to lull him into a deep sleep. But this is also a man who is a night owl, so the time when he's usually falling asleep is when the sun is just beginning to rise. So for this composition, Kojo tuned his drones to match the ruby reds and golden yellows of daybreak. The Mystery Sea Version of Ananta is a linear construct of softened static with wisps of sustained tones spiralling in and out of the mix. The composition shimmers along this focused path with few variations, reflecting a rigor of process much like the champions of minimalism (e.g. Charlemagne Palestine, Roland Kayn, Yoshi Wada) but with a delicate approach found in the likes of Stars Of The Lid. The Strato Version found on the other disc smoothes out the static into a rich undulating surface of warm golden tones, that could easily be an ambient lullaby to accompany a daydream whilst napping at the beach. So, so beautiful!
The Helen Scarsdale reissue does increase the distribution of this disc, although not by much... there's only 300 of these beauties kicking around!
MPEG Stream: "Strato Version"
MPEG Stream: "Mystery Sea Version"

SZAJNER, BERNARD Some Deaths Take Forever (LTM) cd 17.98
Conceived as a soundtrack for a 1980 Amnesty International short film against the Death Penalty, French electronic music maverick, Bernard Szajner (pronounced Shy-nerr) came up with one of the most geniusly bizarre concept records ever made. Imagine if Suicide, David Bowie, Conrad Schnitzler, Bruce Haack, Giorgio Moroder, and Magma made a record together about the de-humanizing extremes of an existentialist Death Row, it might sound something as cold and freaky as this! A minimal wave Magma is definitely not that far off the mark, as Szajner was the lighting and visual effects designer for Magma's live shows in the seventies, and Klaus Blasquiz and Bernard Paganotti of Magma guest here.
The opening track, "Welcome To Death Row" was featured on the awesome compilation of French coldwave, "So Young But So Cold" and Detroit techno producer, Carl Craig has claimed this to be his favorite album of all time! It's definitely got the slow disco vibe down, even though it's hardly a dance record. Add some crooning David Bowie in his Low period moments, but it's way weirder with creepy synth elements, robotic vocals, radio collages, electronic pop and tight, proggy guitar solos added in to highlight a more distasteful side to what Szajner felt to be the all too pleasant quality of synthesized sounds coming out of Germany at the time. That might mean for some, on a first superficial listen, parts of the songs may go to questionable places you may not wish them to go (it was made in 1980, after all!), but it's a much more satisfying listen to follow the songs down all the rabbit holes they go with an open mind. It's definitely one of those eccentric missing link records that crosses through many genres but doesn't sit easily in any one of them.
Bernard Szajner made five records of avant-garde electronic music in the late seventies and early eighties before sadly abandoning music for good, but none of them are quite like this! (His 1981 follow-up Superficial Music has also been reissued and we'll hopefully review it in a future list.) But for all those into such sundry bands as Daft Punk, Droids, Cold Cave, Air, Kraftwerk, Heldon, Arthur Russell, Lindstrom, Gina X, Jonas Reinhardt, the weirder sides of Serge Gainsbourg or any of the bands or artists mentioned above, you need to check this out now!! Oh, and this also includes three bonus tracks, previously unreleased!
MPEG Stream: "Welcome To Death Row"
MPEG Stream: "Ritual"
MPEG Stream: "Ressurector"
MPEG Stream: "A Kind of Freedom"

TERRORAZOR / H4180V21.C Noise Alliance (Deathstrike) 7" 8.98
Evil Avenger has to be one of the weirdest and demented and most original sonic alchemists in black metal. Besides being the mastermind behind 'wooden metal' horde Varghkogarghasmal, and playing in Front Beast, Necroslaughter, Szarlem, Witchslaughter, Angel Of Damnation, Black Priest of Satan, and about a million others, he also is the psychotic genius behind one man blackened grind metal 'combo' Terrorazor, which just might be the weirdest of the bunch.
Ultra chaotic, murky, muddy, noise drenched blackened free metal. Or something like that. This stuff is really far out, and difficult to describe. Disintegrating riffs, splattery free jazz rhythms that only occasionally coalesce into beats, blast and otherwise, guitars swirl and grind and buzz beneath grunted inhuman vox, imagine a black metal Faxed Head, or even a more avant, free jazz Abruptum, or some sick combination of both!
As if Terrorazor wasn't enough madness, the flipside comes from electronic metal weirdos H418ov21.C, named for a record by Finnish metal gods Beherit, but don't be expecting anything like Beherit, or really like anything you've ever heard. The music of H418ov21.C is a totally bizarre blown out tangle of impossibly distorted drum machine and low slung, throbbing free-form downer doom bass. Like Joy Division basslines were stripped from their original songs, and layered over a cacophony of ancient drum machines gone totally haywire and run through a bank of distortion pedals with dying batteries. So fucking bizarre and so amazing.
LIMITED TO ONLY 150 COPIES. Housed in a plain gold sleeve with a printed transparent front cover. Cool.

THORR'S HAMMER Dommedagsnatt (Southern Lord) lp 17.98
The very first Southern Lord release, the only release by this legendary band who existed for a mere 6 weeks in '94/'95, is now available once more, on super deluxe vinyl, 180 gram, housed in an embossed gatefold sleeve with deluxe metallic printing. Here's what we had to say about Dommedagsnatt when we first laid ears on it way back when:
Thorr's Hammer was the deadly, doomful blackened sludge band that featured the SUNNO))) duo of Greg Anderson ("drones and sunns") and Stephen O'Malley ("crust and earth"), along with battledrummer Jamie Sykes, subsonic attacker James Hale, and, last but certainly not least, vocalist Runhild Gammelsaeter. She being an authentic teenage blonde Norwegian and astonishingly capable of spewing gruff, vile vokills as ugly as she isn't. The band broke up when she went back to Oslo, which we're sure made them all very sad. But Thorr's Hammer left the legacy of 1998's Dommedagsnat album: four generally epick tracks of creeping, crushing dooom, definitely for fans of all the Southern Lord filth to follow. So, get down in the dirt and get doomy with this, one of the blackened, gnarled roots of these guys' twisted family tree, other ropey branches being Burning Witch, Khanate, Goatsnake, and SUNNO))).
MPEG Stream: "Troll"

TO KILL A PETTY BOURGEOISIE Marlone (Kranky) cd 14.98
We haven't ever heard any of the other records by this strangely monickered duo, and in some ways it's probably that name that kept us from exploring their music in the past. We know, book, cover, band name, check. But with so much stuff to listen to, it's inevitable that something like album cover or band name or label, will influence what you listen to first, or maybe even at all. But heck, it's Kranky, and the album cover is pretty cool, so two out of three ain't bad. And we have to say we're glad we did finally decide to take the plunge, cuz the world of TKAPB is a gorgeously gloomy one, a haunting and otherworldly late night drift through a world dark and ominous, and occasionally downright frightening. Think Grouper, Mazzy Star, Kuupuu, Valet, that sort of gauzy dreaminess, murky and muddy, spacey and druggy, with ethereal female vocals, barely there drum skitter, warm languid bass, the instruments less recognizable as instruments, and more as sound generating devices, each emitting long tones, or soft rhythms, the result is a slow burning jazzy drone-y drift, but TKAPB seems a bit more sinister than the rest of those bands, imbuing their hazy midnight drift, with some deep drones, some jagged shards of distorted crunch. A creepy dreamy slowcore, with hints of something darker, heavier, and noisier. Just check out "The Needle", a loping slow groove, minor key and tense, the vocals sultry and smoky, creeping and crawling, until suddenly something hellish surfaces, a squall of demonic buzz and noise, only a second or two, but it adds such menace to the track, as does a swirling sea of cymbal sizzle and what sounds like a moaning string section. Almost like some sort of doom torch song.
The rest of the record is maybe not nearly so intense, but it is a very dark record, think Portishead, Grouper, Skepticism, and Bohren all wound up in a sprawling songsuite of drummachined black ballads, harrowing love songs, grim ambience and blackened downtempo electronica, with a sound so gauzy and washed out and murky and psychedelic, and yeah, occasionally menacing, that it's impossible for us not to give this our highest recommendation.
MPEG Stream: "You've Gone Too Far"
MPEG Stream: "The Needle"
MPEG Stream: "Villain"
MPEG Stream: "I Hear You Coming, But Your Steps Are Too Loud"

V/A Psych Funk 101: A Global Psychedelic Funk Curriculum (World Psychedelic Funk Classics) cd 16.98
Looking at the cover of this comp, what catches our eye? Well, of course the words PSYCH and FUNK in big electric pink letters. Pretty much had us right there, we're easy like that. But then the fine print on the sticker on the front adds an extra tingle of excitement: "None of these tracks have ever been reissued"! So what we have here is a survey course on some obscure shit, an international collection of freaky, fuzzy, funky jams from the golden years, circa 1968-1975 or so, mostly from groups we'd never heard of before. The ones did know were a good sign, being super groovy and decidedly eccentric. (Though we do have to point out that at least a few of the cuts here actually have been reissued before, that's how we knew 'em!). Here's the lineup: Hunsu Ozkartal Orkestrasi (Turkey), Kukumbas (Nigeria), Mulatu Astatke feat. Belaynesh Wubante and Assegedetch Asfaw (Ethiopia), Kim Sun (South Korea), Petalouda (Greece), Mehr Pooya (Iran), Staff Carpenborg and The Electric Corona (West Germany), The Group (Italy), Armando Sciascia (Italy), Wadih Essafi (Lebanon), Omar Khorshid (Egypt), Metin H. Alatli (Turkey), George Garanian with The Melodiya Jazz Ensemble (Russia), and Eskaton (France). 14 tracks in all, all of 'em b to the a to the d to the ass. Get ready for plenty of percolating percussion, infectious bass lines, analog synth buzz, chicken scratch guitar, greasy organ, drugged out FX, and in many cases Middle Eastern or African or other 'exotic' ethnic elements as appropriate to their nation of origin. Highlights are almost impossible to pick. All the African stuff is killer (Ethiopiques fans take note), so are the Turkish tracks (you want weird? check out how the Metin H. Alatli cut somehow segues from Richard Strauss Also Sprach Zarathustra 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith music to stoned cocktail bellydance improv!!), so is everything else. We dig how eerieness and jazziness are combined on "The Feed-back" by The Group (aka Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, featuring Ennio Morricone), and also Armando Sciascia's suspenseful "Circuito Chiuso" is pretty eerie too. Both are from Italy, where it seems that it's hard NOT to sound like you're scoring a phantasmagoric horror flick a la Goblin. Also, we love love love the grandiose extended electro-funk from Magmoid progsters Eskaton that closes out the disc. But why keep writing about this, you know you need it - unless your record collection already includes all these rarities, and there's no way it does.
Lovingly compiled with the help of DJs like Cut Chemist and Stone's Throw's Egon, Psych Funk 101 is truly a lesson in, well, a variety of awesome vintage funkiness, in the tradition of other cool comps like Prog Is Not A Four Letter Word, Obsession, Trap Door, and the Afro-centric Love's A Real Thing. Housed in a handsome digipack, it boasts a thick, 36 page booklet featuring a two-page spread on each track, with full color repro of the original LP or 45 sleeve from whence the cut originated, along with a page of text giving more info than you'd expect.
FYI this also came out on vinyl, but was gone so fast, we don't have any to list. However, we are told it is being repressed, soon we hope...
MPEG Stream: PETALOUDA "What You Can Do In Your Life"
MPEG Stream: OMAR KHORSHID "Rakset El Fadaa"
MPEG Stream: ESKATON "Dagon"

V/A Zanzibara 5: Hot In Dar - Le Son La Tanzanie 1978-1983 (Buda Musique) cd 15.98
Already up to number 5 in the Zanzibara series, obviously modeled after the amazing (and seemingly discontinued) Ethiopiques series, but focusing more on the the Eastern coast of Africa: Mombassa, Tanga, Zanzibar, the Comoros, etc. While in some ways the sounds are similar to the music in Ethiopia, like any region, the sounds of Tanazania, the focus of this volume, have their own distinct vibe and feel. Right off the bat, the sound is way more vocal based, jazzy too, with lots of horns, and very bright shiny melodies, in fact much of this reminds us of mariachi music, the same sort of shuffly rhythms, horn fanfares and vocal harmonies. The high life feel is all over these tracks, festive, celebratory, to these ears, it sounds like party music, dance music, music of love and happiness and sunshine, although like much music, even the happiest sounding on the surface, often carried with it deeper darker emotions. This music was the soundtrack of daily life in Tanzania, playing constantly on the radio, influenced by the West for sure, but so much it's own special and unique sound. Fans of the first few volumes will definitely dig, as might fans of the Ethiopiques releases, but really, anyone into high life and sunshiney African grooves, will no doubt find this collection fantastic.
Includes a big booklet, with incredibly in depth liner notes and tons of amazing vintage photos!
MPEG Stream: MLIMANI PARK ORCHESTRA "Visa Vimenichosha"
MPEG Stream: DAR INTERNATIONAL ORCHESTRE "Baba Anna"
MPEG Stream: VIJANA JAZZ BAND "Niletaka Iwe Siri"

VAN PATTERSON QUARTET, THE Live At F.W. (The Tapeworm) cassette 8.98
Latest release in the ever expanding, and extremely eclectic catalog of mysterious (possibly Touch Records related) UK tape label The Tapeworm. Past Tapeworm releases from Philip Jeck, Stephen O'Malley and Simon Fisher Turner have been big hits around here, as was a strange reading of works by Jean Baudrillard. This one might be the weirdest of the bunch though. For several reasons.
Purportedly a lost live set from a band called the Van Patterson Quartet, nothing at all can be found online about the VPQ, -except- all sorts of folks trying to find out who the heck these guys were. One record collector claims to have stumbled across an unlabeled 12", which in fact turned out to be these recordings, but the dearth of information leads us to believe that maybe this is not actually a real artifact of sixties psych, but instead an elaborate, and incredibly kick ass hoax. There's the sound too, which on the surface definitely sounds vintage, the recording super fuzzy and fucked up, lots of tape warble, and lo-fi primitive recording artifacts, but at the same time, the sound is weirdly modern, the effects blown out and trippy, sure there's tons of Hammond organ, which again lends this some serious vintage vibes, but plenty of the tracks get super heavy and super damaged, because of the degraded recordings, much of this sounds like a sixties psych rock Faxed Head, drop outs and hiss as much a part of the jams as the jams themselves. The guitars and organ are HEAVY, the drums mathy and jazzy and powerful, everything hazy and druggy, but the tracks are laced with seriously tweaked effects, and hell, if this IS really a band from the sixties, then this is THE HOLY GRAIL, and the fact that it has never been heard before boggles the mind, and makes it criminal that it's being released on a tape label in a run of only 250 copies. If this WERE real, it would be the reissue of the year, the DECADE. It's that fuzzy and fucked up, dark and droney and hypnotic, which definitely leads us to believe it's some young rockers who built themselves a band / time machine, and are channeling some vintage sounds, and just added all the crowd noise and record crackle and tape hiss and bleedthrough to confuse and obfuscate. It hardly matters really, this is some seriously heavy, droney, twisted, hypnotic, druggy, tripped out shit, fans of modern retro psych like the Wooden Shjips and the Heads and the Telescopes will go nuts for this, as will sixties psych-heads who might want to see if they can figure out if this stuff is new or old. But like we said, hardly matters, cuz what it is, is fucking AWESOME.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES.

VARGHKOGHARGASMAL / H4180V21.C Split (Deathstrike) cassette 4.50
While we wait patiently for the long overdue reissue of the amazing 'wooden metal' masterpiece Call Of The Raven from German black metal weirdos Varghkoghargasmal, we have this split tape to tide us over, a single track from Varghkoghargasmal, and one from the even more damaged and demented H418ov21.C, who we surmise might just be the same band.
The Varghkoghargasmal is another stumbling chaotic chunk of clean guitar surf licks, bizarre, off kilter drumming, all very spare and skeletal and shuffly, lo-fi, and only black metal in spirit, as the sound is more akin to some early nineties post rock outfit, but so much more confusional and fractured. The melodies are epic and majestic, the arrangements are progressive and complex, the execution is all over the map, the drums and guitars locked tight for a stretch, only for the drums to go careening off course, while the guitar slips from muted crunch, to shimmery jangle, to weird warped off key twang and chime. Like a black metal Shaggs, or an even more loose Hypothermia, Varghkoghargasmal have easily created one of the most unique sounds in modern music. All hail WOODEN METAL.
So what's the story with H418ov21.C, other than they're named after a record by Beherit? And a Beherit record that most metal fans hated, seeing as it was all ritualistic ambient and electronic music. But that makes sense that H418ov21.C would look to those Finns for inspiration, as this is also some kind of sonic ritual. Thick throbbing downtuned bass, rumbling, grinding, droning, all beneath a cacophony of old drum machines, heavily effected, spaced out and splattery, not really playing beats so much as creating rhythmic melodies, the effect is pretty stunning, a weird almost krautrocky bit of superdistorted lowslung crunch, the closest comparison we can think of is French sonic alchemists Aluk Todolo, and odds are if you dig their throbbing stripped down rhythms, you'll dig this too. Weird and wonderful, heavy and distorted and weirdly melodic. Definitely need to hear more from these guys (this guy?). And speaking of hearing more, there's also a split 7" elsewhere on this list, featuring another chunk of fractured blackened kraut crawl...
LIMITED TO 70 COPIES (or thereabout), packaged in a super deluxe, multi panel, elaborately folded sleeve.

WHEN BITTER SPRING SLEEPS s/t (Pagan Flames) cd-r 5.98
Black metal records with nature sounds are a dime a dozen, in fact it might be easier to come up with a list of black metal records that DON'T have dubbed in sounds, wolves, wind, goats, whatever grim picture the band is trying to paint, whether it's some pagan ritual with goat sacrifice, or some grim corpsepainted horde playing in the middle of a black forest communing with wolves, a sound effects record makes it all that much more impressive. Or so bands seem to think. There have been bands who supposedly went out into the snowy forest and recorded there, most notably Ulver's Nattens Madrigal, but we're pretty sure that's just a rumor, most likely spread by the band to make the record seem cooler (and probably to explain the impossibly tinny sound), and then there's the fact that even if it WAS true, you can't really -hear- it. Which brings us to When Bitter Spring Sleeps, a black metal horde who hail from the grim frosty abyss known as Cedar Rapids, Idaho, and whose whole identity, nay existence, is based on musically communing with nature. This entire record was performed and recorded in a nature preserve! So all the sounds, all the dripping water, chirping insects, rustling leaves, all of that stuff is captured along side the bands drone-y buzz. We do have to wonder how the band manage to blast and buzz without disrupting the sounds of nature, you know how a field full of frogs and crickets immediately go silent when you walk amongst them. We like to think the band set up, and then just stood there, motionless, for minutes, maybe hours, until the insects and other forest creatures decided the coast was clear, and the band slowly began to play.
The result is pretty compelling, the songs start out all minimal and hushed, usually just guitar, the sound of cicadas and dripping water, croaking frogs, practically drowning out the band, and when the band do kick in, the sound is super raw and tinny (a la Nattens Madrigal, there is a reason bands record in studios after all), the drums are a tiny pound, buried in the mix, the vocals a barely audible croak, the guitars a blurry shimmery cloud of sound. The tracks are epic too, with tons of parts and lots of interludes, where the band drops out, leaving just a single spidery guitar line, and the symphony of insects and creatures.
Super cool, the metal itself is not hugely distinctive, but in this context it works in the record's favor, as the sounds of the instruments are equally balanced by the sounds of nature, almost as if an act of supplication, a musical acknowledgment of out tenuous position here on earth.
Obviously, folks into fucked up far out black metal are gonna NEED this, but if you're into weird Jewelled Antler sort of musical / field recording hybrids, odds are this might be the only black metal record that fits the bill.
SUPER LIMITED. Gorgeous packaging, each one hand made, the printed covers, burned around the edges and scorched all over. The smell a heady mix of flowers and fire. So cool.
MPEG Stream: "What The Rain Knows"
MPEG Stream: "Tears For The Sound Of Darkness"

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ALLEN, TONY Lagos No Shaking (Honest Jons) 2lp 22.00
Now available on vinyl!
So nice to hear a master of their craft! Even nicer when it's new material from someone who has been releasing records since the '70s and it still ranks close to the top of anything he's put out. While he will always get mentioned in the same breath as Fela Kuti (he was part of Fela's band back in the day) Tony Allen should certainly be looked upon as one of the leaders of the Afro-beat movement, not just a kick ass sideman (although he was that too!) What's so impressive is that even after all these years he still sounds passionate and filled with fire and the music totally reflects that. When we put this on for the first time we thought for sure it had to be a reissue as the sounds were as captivating and groovy as all the great '70s Afro-beat records he and Fela recorded together. But closer examination revealed it to be a brand new release and he again demonstrates that just because so many others burn out, fade, that doesn't mean he's gonna... 'cause this album is still a totally funky kick ass outing... and be sure to hang in for the closer 'cause it's the album's sole instrumental and it's totally on fire!
MPEG Stream: "Awa Na Re"
MPEG Stream: "Gbedu"

ARGUS s/t (Shadow Kingdom) cd 13.98
Shadow Kingdom Records are apparently on a quest to rule the cult heavy metal underground, snapping up a lot of cool bands lately in the true metal/trad doom genres. This list we have the debut full-lengths of two of 'em, Argus and Sinister Realm. Both happen to hail from Pennsylvania, which isn't that odd since the Pittsburgh-based Shadow Kingdom would of course wish to conquer nearby territories.
Franklin, PA's Argus are named after that classic Wishbone Ash album, and although they don't sound anything like Wishbone Ash, they do run with the dual guitar thing that band pioneered back in the early '70s, and the guitar harmonies and solos are definitely the main draw here for us. Their tasty twin guitar work is lashed to ponderous riffage and weighty grooves, over which the commanding vocals of "Butch" Balich (ex-Penance) cry out in anguish and anger. With those vocals, and the chugging metalness of it all, we're reminded of the more recent output of Sweden's Grand Magus. Furthermore, fans of the twin axes wielded by Hammers Of Misfortune, for instance, who'd like to hear that sort of thing in an epic doom context, should check this out.
PS this band also features members of stoner rockers Abdullah and the awesomely named thrashers Oh Shit They're Going To Kill Us.
MPEG Stream: "Bending Time"
MPEG Stream: "From Darkness Light"

COLLINS, SHIRLEY False True Lovers ( Vinyl Lovers) lp 25.00
Newly reissue on vinyl, this Britfolk treasure.
Sad old songs sung in the beautiful, pure voice of the incomparable Shirley Collins, the UK's "first lady of folk". This is her very first album from 1959, recorded by her then-boyfriend Alan Lomax (with whom she travelled the American South on his field-recording expeditions) and released on the American Folkways label. Accompanied by banjo and guitar, she sings a variety of British and American traditional folk ballads (including "Scarborough Fair", about which Lomax's thoughful and informative liner notes say "The survival of this ancient piece of folklore is assured by the fact that all the couplets in this song contain gentle, but evocative erotic symbols"). A Shirley Collins record like this might make a good gift for the Gillian Welch fan in your life.

DAVIS, BETTY Is It Love Or Desire (Sundazed) lp 21.00
Now available on vinyl!
There's really no doubt about it, Betty Davis was the true queen of funk! While she was only Mrs. Miles Davis for a very brief time, the influence she had on him was considerable, introducing him to rock and funk culture which undoubtedly led to his amazing funk filled '70s era that resulted in records like On The Corner and Agharta. Then there's her own amazing albums. Her first two records in the early '70s, a self-titled one and They Say I'm Different (both finally back in print on cd, by the way) really are the blueprints for raw, nasty, super charged soul filled funk and they still hold up so well even after all these years, and anytime we play them for someone who has never heard them before, they invariably are instantly blown away and want to learn all they can about the force of funky nature that is Betty Davis.
Little is known about much of her musical output outside of those legendary two albums, well there was a record called Nasty Gal released later in the '70s that has its moments but just didn't quite get to that magical place those first two records did. So when we found out there was a lost album from 1976 finally being released we were both way excited and a bit nervous as we love Betty Davis so much that we didn't want her legacy to be dampened at all with another sub par album. Luckily we didn't have anything to worry about, Is It Love Or Desire is one damn smoking set of fully on fire funk! There is such strength and conviction that in Betty's voice, every word she sings oozing with sez and power and intensity. If you've never heard any of her albums before we INSIST you get those first two records immediately - they are truly holy grails of funk, so it is pretty impossible to match that level of greatness, but this one really comes damn close.
There is such a raw and hedonistic salaciousness to these songs. You can picture some hedonistic no holds barred seventies coke party with this blasting in the background as the perfect soundtrack. These jams are almost abstract in their sheer funkiness, the band vamping, Davis and an equally badass male vocalist trading off exclamations and exultations of the FUNK. So crazy to think how early in the game Davis was getting to such a raw, deep and nasty side of things, WAY before folks like Rick James, Grace Jones, Chaka Kahn, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Missy Elliott, Trina, Lil' Kim, and Beth Ditto would all become mega stars channeling the same sort of energy. Funk lessons don't come with more fire and sexual swagger then when Betty Davis is on the mic, take out your pen and paper because school is in session!
PS Make sure to check out the amazing photo spread in the cd booklet for some seriously scandalous photos!
MPEG Stream: "Is It Love Or Desire"
MPEG Stream: "Crashin' From Passion"
MPEG Stream: "Stars Starve, You Know"

DECIBEL #61 November 2009 magazine 4.95
This "extremely extreme" magazine of METAL returns with an issue featuring Baroness on the cover (their impending new record proclaimed by Decibel as 'what may be' the album of the year). Other bands featured this ish: Megadeth, Vader, Dying Fetus, Ancestors, Destroyer 666, Ahab, Doomriders, Shadows Fall, Despised Icon, and more. We are pleased to see Accept's Restless And Wild be inducted into Decibel's metal album Hall of Fame, and the accompanying story about the making of that classic album is interesting reading for sure. And we are even more pleased to see a "Call & Response" blindtest feature with William Murderface and Toki Wartooth of Dethklok! Hilarious. Plus there's all the reviews and columns and stuff, including as usual John Darnielle's South Pole Dispatch.

FLAMES OF HELL Fire and Steel (Draconian Records) cd 18.98
BACK IN STOCK. FOR A MATTER OF MINUTES MOST LIKELY. We managed to get, like, 5 copies of this mysterious cd reissue the first time around, and the disappeared in a flash, we've been on the hunt for more ever since, and just found a distributor who happened to have 5 more copies. So like before, act fast if you want one, as we won't be getting any more. Unless we get very very lucky. Again. And we sure wish we could though, 'cause this is thee best doomy DIY black metal album recorded in 1987 in the basement of a YMCA building in Iceland we've EVER heard!!
So lo-fi and raw and fucked up it's amazing, with tons of cult '80s atmosphere (a la Hellhammer) and truly bizarre vocal stylings, as on the chugging, erupting "Evil". What strange wretched howlings and absurd rasping shrieks! Like, Tim Baker of Cirith Ungol with more than one frog in his throat. Musically this both shreds and sludges, in both cases clogged with lo-fi production (not helped by this reissue's dodgy mastering from what sounds like a crackly vinyl original) and off kilter outsider aesthetics. But that's all part of the charm. It has to be heard to be believed.
If you liked, say, some of the other eccentric '80s metal artifacts like Black Hole or Dark Quarterer that we've reviewed, and want to hear the "Venom" version of a band like that, this is for you.
MPEG Stream: "Evil"
MPEG Stream: "Flames Of Hell"

FOREST CREATURE Frustrated Analogue - 7 Edits From 2009 (Blackest Rainbow) cd 16.98
FINALLY BACK IN STOCK!!
Apparently, this UK duo, Ben Moon and Richard Sides, aka Forest Creature, have dabbled in all manner of noisemaking in their brief existence, creating huge crushing walls of speaker shredding brutality, or super glitched out psychedelic beat heavy crunch, or howling, live, drum driven psychnoise freakouts, and while traces of those sounds are still present, we have to say, we're pretty partial to the twisted noise captured here, a seeming distillation of those disparate sounds, into something much more refined and focused, perhaps equally varied sonically, but somehow still strangely cohesive, and epic 'song' suite, due in no small part to the editing and sequencing as the actual music making itself.
The label drops names like Black Dice, Fuck Buttons, Animal Collective, Autechre, and those all do pretty much apply, but to our ears, there seems to be much more to Forest Creature than just aping their influences, we hear the ominous cinematic synthiness of Goblin, the intense late night noir buzz of recent aQ faves D.A., the murky swirl and shimmery out-of-time new age-y drift of the recent crop of pop hypnogogists, but here, those influences, as well as a handful of purloined sounds, are all reimagined, reinterpreted and all tangled up into constantly squirming and unraveling soundscapes, that skitter from almost kraut-like mesmer, to nineties style IDM, to looped woozy minimal synth wave, to gorgeous haunting murky heroin house, but no matter what the sound, or where the songs seem to be headed, Forest Creature mold all those elements into something truly original, lush, and deep, and dark, sometime super chaotic and hyper rhythmic, other times hushed and ominous. "Edit 4" begins as a foreboding minimal slow burning drone, but eventually builds to a warped synth loop, that gets more and more crunchy and buzz, the low end billowing out like a black cloud, the effects eating away at the original loop, super intense and totally mesmerizing. "Edit 5" is all rumbling low end whir, a distant beat, buried way down in the murk, looped and skittery, hovers below a black ambience that seems to swirl and shimmer in slow motion. "Edit 3" might be the prettiest of the bunch, beginning with a skeletal high end looped rhythm, which is soon joined by some warm warbly synths way off in the distance, the rhythm remains steady, but that low end grows thicker, and buzzier, creating thick warm slabs of chordal hum, playing out a gorgeous melancholy slowcore melody, a haunting depressive slow pop crawl, run through with that skeletal skitter, until both the buzz and the beat, begin to crumble, and intensify, until the song is transformed into a noise drenched psychedelic swirl.
So awesome. And a little bit surprising coming from Blackest Rainbow, whose past releases have tended more toward groups like Jazzfinger, Barn Owl, Bong, Starving Weirdos and the like. Frustrated Analogue is some fantastically twisted, blissed out, synth heavy electronic psychedelia, repetitive, hypnotic, spaced out, warped and glitchy, drone-y and rhythmic, moody and mysterious, a dizzying melding of This Heat, Goblin, John Carpenter, old Warp Records 12"s, early Chain Reaction, modern synthdrone, early analogue synth music, and the groups we mentioned up top (Fuck Buttons, Black Dice, Animal Collective, etc.). Way way recommended. Easily one of our new favorites...
MPEG Stream: "Edit 1"
MPEG Stream: "Edit 2"
MPEG Stream: "Edit 3"

LE LOUP Family (Hardly Art) cd 11.98
It really is kind of remarkable the amount of direct influence Animal Collective has had on music makers in the last several years. We heard their influence on the Le Loup debut from a few years ago and this follow up finds this East Coast band still very much indebted to the sound that Animal Collective have created with their multilayered dense pop doused in reverb and bursting at the seems with harmony and melody. This time around it seems they've tapped more into the Panda Bear side of the Animal Collective equation as Family really does have a similar sound and feel to PB's masterpiece Person Pitch. Some of the instrumentation Le Loup uses does help set them a bit apart from the flock of Animal Collective followers, laying down some pretty awesome sounds with the banjo. A friend of ours recently commented that so many of today's Animal Collective soundalikes will be remembered as the modern equivalent to the Dave Clark Five in the time of The Beatles, but hell, when it comes to knock offs, Le Loup have it down pretty damn well.
MPEG Stream: "Saddle Mountain"
MPEG Stream: "Morning Song"

LE LOUP Family (Hardly Art) lp 13.98
It really is kind of remarkable the amount of direct influence Animal Collective has had on music makers in the last several years. We heard their influence on the Le Loup debut from a few years ago and this follow up finds this East Coast band still very much indebted to the sound that Animal Collective have created with their multilayered dense pop doused in reverb and bursting at the seems with harmony and melody. This time around it seems they've tapped more into the Panda Bear side of the Animal Collective equation as Family really does have a similar sound and feel to PB's masterpiece Person Pitch. Some of the instrumentation Le Loup uses does help set them a bit apart from the flock of Animal Collective followers, laying down some pretty awesome sounds with the banjo. A friend of ours recently commented that so many of today's Animal Collective soundalikes will be remembered as the modern equivalent to the Dave Clark Five in the time of The Beatles, but hell, when it comes to knock offs, Le Loup have it down pretty damn well.
MPEG Stream: "Saddle Mountain"
MPEG Stream: "Morning Song"

MOJO October 2009 magazine + cd 9.99
The Beatles on the cover, this issue featuring an exclusive interview with Sir Paul discussing the remasters, and Rock Band... There's also a free cd stuck to the cover (in a jewel case like they do!) featuring cover versions of songs from Abbey Road done by the likes of Cornershop, Robyn Hitchcock, Jeffrey Lewis, Gomez, and some less familiar names as well. But it's not all Beatles this ish, we're pleased to see a piece on Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells! Also: Bunny Wailer, Prefab Sprout, The Who, The Cribs (now w/ Johnny Marr), and more... the usual pages and pages of well informed reviews, plus news, photos, etc. etc. to keep your music obsessed brain busy for a while.

MOON DUO Love On The Sea (Sick Thirst) 12" 8.98
Got a handful more of these in from the band along with the new 12" we listed last time... so back in stock, while they last!
We'll just spare the long-winded build up and get straight to the point: Moon Duo is the new side project from Ripley, guitarist for San Francisco's psychedelic heroes Wooden Shjips, and it kicks plenty of ass. This lengthy two song ep rocks in a similar, albeit slightly more stripped down way, and like the Shjips, Moon Duo is all about super hypnotic, highly rhythmic repetition with plenty of awesome fuzz guitars and simple but powerful drumming. And like all vinyl only offerings from Ripley's main gig, this is also coming to you in highly limited numbers, so act now or suffer later.
The first track, "Love On The Sea," previously appeared in edited form on a recent Yeti magazine compilation. But really, why would anyone want something coming from a Wooden Shjips dude to be slimmed down to fit on a cd with other groups? Thankfully, the version here uses an entire side to help you get even further lost in its endless melodic grooves. The song comes off as the perfect mix of krauty propulsion with fuzzed out, druggy American garage rock from the '60s, and the lo-fi recording works really well to get you nice and disoriented. Murky vocals, swirling organs and bright guitar accents give you the impression of what it would be like to relax in a room full of strobe lights going full blast, and after a while you can't tell whether the drums are a thumping backbeat or a straightforward groove. Whatever the case, it's sounding damn good to our ears.
On side 2 we have "E-Z Street Ext," which actually sounds a bit like an instrumental minor key version of the song "Down By The Sea" from the Shjips' recent Dos record. There's a nice dose of wild fuzz guitar action, but here the organ takes center stage with its awesome underwater sound. The drums are a steady pound, and as the guitar begins to decay into crumpling waves of distortion, things seem to speed up and build in intensity before arriving at a prolonged cymbal loop which itself appropriately ends in a locked groove.
Again, this is super limited, and if you couldn't already tell, it is absolutely required listening for those who can't get enough Wooden Shjips.

SINISTER REALM s/t (Shadow Kingdom) cd 13.98
Shadow Kingdom Records are apparently on a quest to rule the cult heavy metal underground, snapping up a lot of cool bands lately in the true metal/trad doom genres. This list we have the debuts of two of 'em, Argus and Sinister Realm. Both happen to hail from Pennsylvania, which isn't that odd since the Pittsburgh-based Shadow Kingdom would of course wish to conquer nearby territories.
Allentown's Sinister Realm, featuring a couple current and ex-members of stoner doom stalwarts Pale Divine, play a '80s influenced brand of "black candles & pentagrams n' shit" occult metal, on the midpaced, epick doomy side of things, with lots of headbanging, air-guitaring, invisible-orange-lofting potential. The bald domed, Anton-Lavey-in-leather lookin' vocalist really does the job right, his histrionic delivery the perfect match for the dark riffs and neo-classical shred offered up by the band's two guitarists. We get the idea that the bass player is the main songwriter, and he has a knack for stuff that sounds both sinister (yep) and anthemic. For fans of Candlemass, Solitude Aeturnus, Mercyful Fate, as well as Satan (the devil, not the band, we mean) and also the Shadow Kingdom roster in general.
MPEG Stream: "(The Oracle) Into The Depths Of Hell"
MPEG Stream: "The Demon Seed"

VULCANUS 68 2 (Gigante Sound) cd-r 6.98
Bay Area sound sculptors Dominic Cramp and Jared Blum don many musical hats of their own design and in collaboration with others (perhaps most notably, Cramp is in Carla Bozulich's wonderful Evangelista band), and we've carried quite a few of their various projects' recordings here. Have to say, Vulcanus 68 might be one of our faves. This is their second release, and it's as cryptic as the first. They dispel with song titles, instead each track is cataloged with a number/letter. From the seemingly innocuously described instrumentation of electronics, and multispeed turntables and tapes, they churn up a stewed aural bog for you to sink your ears into. It's an ominous sci-fi soundscape populated by insectile prickles, slippery gelatinous gurgles, gritty buzzing masses and heavy rolling drones. Might just be us, but compared to the darkly mischievous tone of Vulcanus 68's debut release, we sense more of an undercurrent of skin-crawling malevolence here. Potentially nightmare inducing. Aaiiieeee... heh heh... good stuff! 47 minutes. Recommended.
MPEG Stream: "4a"
MPEG Stream: "5b"

WAX POETICS Issue #37 magazine 9.99
Michael Jackson on the covers, front and back, but as a child in the '70s, Jackson Five era of course. Inside, there's plenty of MJ and Jacksons content, including a piece about director John Landis and the Thriller video.
Also in this issue of our favorite funk/soul/jazz/hiphop magazine, there's stuff on Mayer Hawthorne, The Emperor Machine, Lee Fields, Shawn Lee, Illa J, Phenomenal Handclap Band, Nicky Siano, Wah Wah Watson and others...
And as usual, there's tons of glorious full color photography, and record reviews, and record reviews with glorious full color sleeve photos... drool.

ZOROASTER Voice Of Saturn (Kreation) lp 16.98
NOW ON VINYL, via the always helpful in that department Kreation label!
Anyone who has happened to catch Atlanta's Zoroaster in a live setting will more than likely mention the same few details: walls of multiple full stacked amplifiers, strobe lights with no apparent "off" switch, and three dudes bringing the DOOM like nobody's business. But most of all, massive, MASSIVE volume. And while Zoroaster effortlessly lay waste on stage, their albums manage to retain this monolithic heaviness while also revealing a method of songwriting that probably wouldn't be described as "nuanced", but nonetheless brings more than a few surprises. Unlike many doom bands, Zoroaster display a notable melodic presence, which makes for one hell of a combination with their metallic tendencies toward sloooooooooow, lumbering riffs, powerful caveman drumming, and vocals that sometimes venture into guttural black metal territory. Without fail, any time we put on a Zoroaster disc, someone in the store, be it aQ staffer or customer, will come up with a slightly confused look on their face and ask what we're listening to. After all, you could probably count on one hand the number of doom bands who manage to incorporate French horns and Theremins into the mix while still coming across as uncompromisingly heavy. Atmospherics are another staple of Zoroaster's psychedelicized approach, with strange bursts of oscillated fuckery worming into the mix but never taking over to the point of distraction. AND everyone in the band is credited with playing Moog, which is just fucking awesome...
On Voice of Saturn, the band's second full length, things start with a brief ambient intro that leads right into the first song, "Seeing the Dark". Rather than trying to explain "stoner rock" to someone, it might be more advantageous to simply put on a song like this, a plodding burst of fuzzed out heaviness that rocks ridiculously hard with gigantic guitars and sandpaper vocals. But then, in maybe the biggest what-the-fuck moment in Zoroaster's career, a simple repeated piano note takes over as everything else dwindles away before returning with cleanly hummed vocals for a beautifully mind-melting slowcore jam. Bravo guys. "Spirit Molecule" clocks in at a lengthy 13 minutes, allowing the band time to brew up a heavier than thou dirge with bits of otherworldly noise before heading into "Undying", an ominous downtempo groove accented by strange witchlike vocals that sound like they were beamed in from some unknown galaxy. "White Dwarf" is a decaying soundscape made up of white noise and underlying synth pulses that segues into the title track, where the band sparks up another doomed out blast of negative energy as the appropriate mantra of "Chaos" brings the song to its conclusion. "Lamen of the Master Therion" closes the album with a familiar sound that you quickly realize is the aforementioned beautifully mind-melting slowcore jam, the piano now accompanied by a strummed acoustic guitar! FUCK YES! Even after that, you can stick around a bit for the secret track, a cool drumcentric moment that we will not describe as "tribal".
Hopefully this new disc will bring Zoroaster to the attention of more people, since they are obviously choice candidates to the current throne of doom. Anyone digging Sleep, Electric Wizard, and UFOmammut will do themselves a real favor by picking up Voice of Saturn, and adventurous non-metalheads might find something to like as well. Needless to say, this one is coming to you highly recommended.
CHAOSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!
MPEG Stream: "Seeing The Dark"
MPEG Stream: "Undying"

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731 Live On PBS 106.7 FM 06.12.2006 (Testsubject) cd 3.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
A seriously corrosive chunk of ultra blown out frenzied power violence from down under. Or as the sleeve proclaims over and over around the border "raw-grind-violence". And that's just what this is, violent, raw, and grind. Recorded live on the radio, 7 tracks, 12 minutes, of buzzing blown out riffage, churning chugging guitars, screeched shrieks, bellowed howls, furious octopoidal drumming, relentless blastbeats, pounding doomy plod, all wound up into a face melting explosion of power violence fury.
Fans of any of the recent crop of power violence warriors will definitely dig: Iron Lung, Endless Blockade, and it's always good to know the spirit of Crossed Out, MITB, Drop Dead, No Comment still burns bright worldwide.
Super limited cd-r, pretty sure it's out of print already, we only have a handful of copies...
MPEG Stream: "A Most Deafening Silence"
MPEG Stream: "Record Collector Dissctor"

HEADS OF PAGAN Under The Tall And Darkened Arches (Faunasabbatha) 3" cd-r 5.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Heads Of Pagan are a duo, just voice, guitars and effects, but their 21 minute track sounds more like a tangle of crumbling downtuned basses. Low rumbling, thunderous riffs, slowed way down and allowed to pulse and throb, reverberate and whir, slightly percussive, the sound of pick hitting string is quickly swallowed up by black billows of rib cage rattling sound, very abstract and murky, muddy and mysterious, which over the course of the track grow in intensity, becoming thicker, more grinding, more distorted, the notes and melodies becoming less indistinct, transforming into a roiling black bass drone, only occasionally offering up fragments of melody, sharp bolts of feedback entering the fray, eventually building into a full on Merzbow style noise track, but with the basses becoming fuzzy and alien, sounding instead like synths, oh but they're guitars so it's even stranger, buzzing warbly confusional chaos smeared into a dense blackened low end blur. Heavy but not metal, brutal but still sort of ambient. Definitely for fans of the sloooooow and looooooow.
LIMITED TO 66 COPIES. In a mini 3" sleeve with a mini 3" printed insert.
MPEG Stream: "Under The Tall And Darkened Arches (excerpt 1)"

LASCOWIEC / MARBLEBOG / VERZIVATAR Deep Horizons Of Eternity (Turanian Honour) cd 9.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
We've been trying to get our hands on enough of these to list for ages, a killer 3 way split of obscure strangely melodic blackness, released on Hungarian label Turanian Honour, featuring long time aQ faves Marblebog, Bay Area depressive black metal duo Lascowiec and Verzivatar, another Hungarian horde we had never heard until now.
Lascowiec, whose killer demo compilation we raved about a while back (which we still have a small handful left), returns with four more tracks of washed out black beauty, darkly depressive and beautifully buzzy, the music of Lascowiec is a blurred and smeared minor key mystery, remove the distorted vokill croak, and you'd be left with a deep swirling shoegazey bit of soft focus buzz. The riffs are muted and muddy, lo-fi but still lush, locked into trancelike loops, woozy and warbly and hypnotic, about as pretty as black metal can sound without ceasing to be black or metal. Spidery tangled little melodies, wreathed in otherworldly effects, distorted but not harsh or jagged, more smoothed out and blissy, the vocals the grimmest element, but for the most part, it's the music that carries Lascowiec, gorgeously mournful, and hauntingly lovely buzzy blackness.
Marblebog offer up two songs, epic and majestic, melodic too, but with some super twisted way UP in the mix vocals, that transform an otherwise loping mysterious minor key dirge into something creeped out and harrowing. The main melody is gorgeous, almost power metal sounding, albeit slowed down and draped over a monotonous doomy drum plod, but those vocals, the perfect blend of harsh and hellish, brooding and pretty. Their second track is another strange blend, this time the guitars and drums are buried beneath thick swirling keyboards, and some fucked up demonic gurgled croaking vocals. Again, the effect is the same, a sort of woozy softly buzzing prettiness transformed into a fractured, Burzumic, off kilter depressive black dirge.
Finally Verzivatar deliver two tracks of fierce and frantic blasting blackness, but like the other two bands on the split, their sound is marked by an unlikely melodiousness, the riffs, frenetic and buzzy are also soaring and majestic, the vocals here too are weird, but less black metal, or really metal at all, more like a raspy punkish howl, or a strangled mewl. Gives Verzivatar a sort of crusty punkish vibe, reminding us a bit of French faerical black metal punks Nuit Noire. Definitely need to hear more from these guys.
All three bands offer up some seriously gorgeous melodic grimness, some surprisingly blissed out black metal buzz, unfortunately this is LIMITED TO 666 COPIES, and has been out for a while, so not sure we can get more. Each one is hand numbered, with a big full color booklet, liner notes, lyrics and the works.
MPEG Stream: LASCOWIEC "By Eight Hooves To Asgard"
MPEG Stream: MARBLEBOG "Rivers Of Eternity"
MPEG Stream: VERZIVATAR "Final Catharsis"

NATIVE IN BLACK At The Mystic Gates Of Eternal Winter (Cold Breath Of Silence) cd 9.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
We most definitely have a thing for Russian black metal, Old Wainds, Stielhas Storhett, Forest, Branikald, Raven Dark, Nav, Ithdabquth Qliphoth, we could go on and on. So we're always psyched to discover some new band we had never heard, or heard of before, such was the case with Native In Black, whose 2008 disc At The Gates Of Eternal Winter we just managed to get in, and it's a killer, but the cool thing is it's a whole different take on black metal than we're used to, especially from Russian bands.
Their sound is cold and grim and frosty and buzzy, but it's not really furious or fast, it's also not stripped down or raw, instead it's almost like some weird variant of classic eighties metal, mixed with a little blackness, and a lot of thrash. It's hard to describe, but much like the Ruins cd reviewed elsewhere on this list, the more we listen to this the better it sounds. Most black metal is droney or blurry, barely headbangable, but this shit is epic, and totally rocking, midtempo most of the time, and when it is fast, it's not blast beats, but more furious and sort of punk rock. Lurching and lumbering, pounding fists in the air. The vocals are awesome too, definitely a black metal shriek, but also frenzied and super dramatic, a bit like Mr. Doctor or something, giving the black metal a distinctly over the top Devil Doll vibe. In fact the more we dig into this record, the less distinctly black metal it sounds, and the more it sounds like some fucked up noise rock band, who just so happen to have some metal roots, a tangled mathy buzz, wrapped around those crazy vox, and shot through with a bit of stumbly punk rock, and streaks of blackened grimnity. Live these guys could easily either be corpsepainted and bespiked, or a bunch of bearded dudes in jeans and tshirts, leaping all over the stage, flailing wildly and stage diving, hardly matters, either way this shit rules!
MPEG Stream: "Blackest Northern Orchestra"
MPEG Stream: "At The Mystic Gates"
MPEG Stream: "Ladies And Gentlemen"

NINTH DESERT Zone (Mystery Sea) cd-r 11.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
There are a handful of cd-r labels out there who are meticulous, not only with the music they choose to release, but with the packaging, the presentation, the ideas and inspiration behind the label, the theme that runs through all of the music, with everything related to their label and the music on it, which is always so inspiring, especially when everyone you know has a limited cd-r label. One of our favorites is Belgian label Mystery Sea, who specialize in what they call "night-ocean drones", and each disc is gorgeously packaged with full color artwork, that matches the artwork on the disc, and it all reflects the music contained within. We get as many copies as we can, but with almost every Mystery Sea releases we get, they tend to disappear quite quickly.
The latest comes from Ninth Desert, whose sound is anything but arid and dry, desolate and warm. Instead, the sounds on Zone are cold, cool, chilly, wintery, lots of glistening high end, the sounds you might imagine would emanate from vast ice fields, or deep snowy caves, not so much rumble and buzz as sparkle and glimmer and glisten. Even at it's most low-end dronelike, the whirs are wrapped in streaks of keening high end, everything is bright and blown out. It's like the sonic version of laying in a huge snow bank, staring at the sun, everything is white and bright, too much for your eyes to handle so everything sort of glazes into strange indistinct shapes, glowing and shifting, like clouds in the sky, or huge slow moving chunks of ice in the sea. These sounds are arctic, almost alien, like wandering on the surface of some strange planet, everything icy and barren, cold winds whir and whine, the sound of the slow moving glaciers a muted creaking, all smeared into dreamy swaths of high end shimmer. So lovely. And so refreshing to experience a soothing, slow moving drone record, that doesn't rely entirely on low end rumble, but at the same time manages to make upper register sounds as soothing and soft focus as their lower ended brethren.
Like all Mystery Sea releases, strictly LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc numbered on the tray card, and gorgeously packaged with striking full color artwork.
MPEG Stream: "Strate"
MPEG Stream: "Marhbe"
MPEG Stream: "Green"

R.Y.N. Cosmic Birth (Turgid Animal) cd 7.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
We were pretty into the R.Y.N 7" we reviewed a while back on the mighty Drone Records label. But this is the first full length we've gotten our hands on (apparently there's another companion full length released earlier this year) and it's pretty amazing. Huge tectonic slabs of glacial doomic drone, equal parts Sunroof!, Sunn 0))), Wolf Eyes, deep grinding low end, shimmering black expanses of churning, washed out murk, blurred and smeared into apocalyptic dirgescapes. Deep dense and ominous, but strangely pretty as well. What we didn't know until quite recently, was that R.Y.N. features the man behind long time aQ faves Marzuraan, which makes sense when you think about it, as most of the R.Y.N record sounds like it could be the early stages of a Marzuraan album, or more accurately, a Marzuraan record with all the metal and pummel removed, no vocals, no buzzing downtuned guitars, just the blackened shadows beneath, and the guitars that DO surface, are blurred into long sheets of undulating washed out muted buzz, wreathed in sheets of feedback, often building to high end symphonies that threaten the very fabric of your inner ear, before slowly subsiding into something much more tranquil and dronelike. And these aren't simple tones either, these are rough edged crumbling sonic expanses, rife with metallic buzz, haunting overtones, layered and dense, a sound active and ALIVE, a burning buzz that often sounds like it's barely being restrained. Often slipping into something soft and smooth, drifting in the distance, lulling the listener before exploding into a sound much more fierce, white hot and glimmering violently like a collision between two sonic suns, with the tracks that follow, like the aftermath, long glowing streaks of sound, unfurling in an endless expanse of blackness, peppered with soft focus glimmers, and barely audible rumbles.
The sound of R.Y.N. manages to shift from krautrocky new age to post industrial black ambience and back again, often finding a sonic space right in between that we probably didn't think even existed.
By now, it should be obvious if this is your thing, but here's a few other names, that if found in your collection, probably speaks to the likelihood that you need this: Atavist, Hlidolf, Encomiast, Troum, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Fear Falls Burning, Expo '70, Half Makeshift, Sorc'Henn, Xela.
MPEG Stream: "Cosmic Birth"
MPEG Stream: "Brain Pictures"
MPEG Stream: "Catacombs"

SLOTH A Whole Other World Of Fun aka 13 Songs 13 Samples (At War With False Noise) cd 7.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Some of you probably already know Sloth, a mysterious band of Midwestern sludgelords who in the past shared splits with folks like Corrupted, Grief, Upsidedown Cross, Floor, Noothgrush and Grief, and sonically, these guys were a pretty perfect fit amidst such illustrious company, but even back in the day, the sound of Sloth was a bit cracked, a bit demented, hints of some serious psychosis lurking beneath their lurching, downtuned exterior.
Surprisingly, this is their first full length EVER, but maybe not so surprisingly, given a whole cd to stretch out on, the weirdness factor is through the roof. This is most definitely not a proper sludge record, although there are some seriously sludge-y moments. There's also lots of weirdo rock, a bit of classic sounding grunge, some Amrep style postpunk noise, some cracked pop, and some seriously what-the-fuck sonic action all over the place. It sounds a bit like a musical clusterfuck, and it sort of is, but in a good way, and all those disparate sounds sort of fitting together, like some musical Frankenstein's monster. Not to mention, as the title suggests, the record is split into 13 songs and 13 samples, with each sample, some as short as 4 seconds getting their own track.
So yeah, even with such an amazing sludge pedigree, we're not sure we would necessarily recommend this to those looking for something like Corrupted, Moss, Bunkur and the like. A Whole Other World Of Fun is more for folks who like their music, heavy, difficult, troublesome, confusional and very very very fucked up. Just have a listen to the sound samples and maybe it will start to make sense. Probably not though...
The record opens with some grungy redneck punk rock, somewhere between Scissorfight and Fucked Up, but with some killer riffing, some weird death metal grunts, and some awesome post rock-y breakdowns. The rest of the tracks are really all over the place, from creeping Slintish mathrock (complete with spoken word vocals) and a twisted howled banshee like chorus, to a super blown out space rock groove, with an ultra distorted riff, some bizarre vocals, and some haunting keyboards making it weirdly propulsive and a bit krauty, to a sea shanty forest folk sing along, to killer lo-fi buzzing indie rock, plodding primitive black metal and every stop in between. The only truly sludge-y track is "Pike Flower Shop", a lurching, stumbling ultradirge, but even then, it's peppered with weird electric organs, raspy vocals, and fucked up production. There's also a bit of a Ween vibe throughout the whole disc, that is if Ween were some sort of weirdo power violence band.
The record ends with a murky bass and drums plod, run through with buried in the mix group vocals, occasionally interrupted by a feral death metal howl, twice as loud as the rest of the music. Fucked up for sure, bizarre, but pretty damn cool. Which basically describes the whole record.
Way recommended, but only for folks with a twisted sense of humor and a taste for heavy, all-over-the-map weirdness.
NB. by the way, this band features none other than Derek Erdman, of "Kathy McGinty" fame!!
MPEG Stream: "The Wooleybear Looked At You?"
MPEG Stream: "A Night At The Park"
MPEG Stream: "UFO Zombies"
MPEG Stream: "Lagoons"

SMOLEN, DAVE Malleable Laminates (Sprout And Flora) cd-r 5.00
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A while back we reviewed a disc by a group called Flittermice Of Eld, a sort of abstract ambient drone homage to Darkthrone, in particular their classic track "As Flittermice as Satan's Spys", which of course ended up sounding nothing like Darkthrone at all, but kicked our asses nonetheless.
So what do these Flittermice do when they're not pulling apart black metal institutions and reshaping the bits into their own twisted little soundscapes?
Well, actually, sort of the same thing, just without the Darkthrone bits (although we can't say for sure there are no Darkthrone bits here). But Mr. Dave Smolen, he of the aforementioned Flittermice, here strikes out on his own, and the result is very similar to the sound on Flittermice, albeit a bit more minimal and electronic, a slow burning lowercase trawl through a soundworld of electronic crackle and minimal glitch and buzz, twenty minutes of drifting static discharge, bursts of high end shimmer and shift, layers of metallic reverberation drift through spacious expanses of whir and rumble, clouds of spacey FX swirl around disembodied shards of percussion and muted rhythms. Serene and ambient, but also dense and intense, like slithering through a lightning storm, or crawling through a field of electrically charged vibrating steel strings...
Weird and quite cool...
SUPER LIMITED!!! Of course, packaged in hand screened cardstock jackets housed in thick vinyl sleeves.
MPEG Stream: "Malleable Laminates"

STRIBORG Nocturnal Emissions / Nyctophobia (Displeased) cd 10.00
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If black metal has a "Jandek" then Striborg might be it. Certainly, an argument can be made that black metal itself is already "outsider art" and then if that's the case, where to put Striborg? Outside the outside. So much of Striborg's eccentrically intimate, idiosyncratic output (this disc holding many fine examples, for instance at one point when it sounds like he's playing the violin in the shower) is so exquisitely wrong it's right, so inadvertently avant-garde and very much trance-inducing that of course Striborg is a big AQ fave. Until recently, though, it was easier for us to get Jandek cds than those of Striborg. But at long last the gates to Striborg's lair have swung open, and the many previously hard-to-find recordings by this Tasmanian black metal savant (as you may know, Striborg is a "band" staffed solely by the mysterious Sin-Nanna) are now readily available to us... and to you, the discriminating consumer of fucked-up black metal. Among the many Striborg discs that we for so long wanted but were unable to stock, is this one. Another essential in Striborg's damaged discography for sure. This cd combines two demos from 2002 and 2003, so it's material from pretty early on in Sin-Nanna's career of evil, though his demo-days go back as far as 1997, and these are in fact the final two (4th and 5th) demos released before he started making "proper albums" instead, although production-wise we can detect no great differences! This cd compilation of those two demos was originally released in 2003 by Striborg's own Finsternis Productions in a limited edition of 500 copies, and has now been resurrected by Displeased (along with, as we said, several other desirable Striborg artifacts).
Nocturnal Emissions consists of the title track, followed by "Despondent Cries", "Son Of The Moon", and "The Freezing Northland". The latter is interesting 'cause you'd think in Striborg's case it would be "The Freezing Southland", being so nearby to Antarctica, but it turns out that this track is a tribute to another one-man black metal cult, Norway's Ildjarn. We should also note that "The Son Of The Moon" is dedicated to Sin Nanna's baby boy, Zachariah aka Sin-Nanna junior (the name Sin-Nanna that of the god of the crescent moon in ancient Sumer, btw). This might be the first and only black metal song written by a proud father to his newborn son! In welcoming his child to "this world of tragedy, magic and sorrow", he tells him, "the stars of Aquarius is [sic] on your side".
Otherwise, Striborg's lyrical themes are entirely depressive and misanthropic, all mope-tropes matched of course by his music, the ever-present droning black buzz, a fuzzed-out spray of monochrome guitar distortion, through thick fields of which wander Striborg's special, utterly non-metroymic drum-stumble and o'er which he rasps his despondent cries.
The four tracks of Nyctophobia are next, "Under Black Rain", "Through The Dark Fog", "Across Thornfields", and "Into Night Moor". We'll single out "Under Black Rain" for mention, as it's composed entirely of what sounds like woozy violin improv, his jittering string-scrape punctuated by a resonating gong-blows, mixed with field recordings of drizzling rain and ominous thunderclaps... we'd be happy with just a whole disc of just that! But each track here has its unique charms, "Through Dark Fog" in particular notable for Sin-Nanna's excessively distorted vocal turn. And "Into Night Moor" is a beautiful outro of isolationist electronic ambience. It seems everything he touches turns, not to gold, but to blackened weirdness. Weird enough we assure you that you'll be giving your stereo strange looks and often rewinding to hear some choice bit of bizarreness again and again, if you share our taste in outsider black metal oddity! None more sublime than Striborg.
We'll have reviews of a couple more Striborg reissues soon (Trepidation and Spiritual Catharsis) and also look forward to a new release, the Journey Of A Misanthrope DVD...
MPEG Stream: "Nocturnal Emissions"
MPEG Stream: "Despondent Cries"
MPEG Stream: "Under Black Rain"
MPEG Stream: "Through The Dark Fog"

TENHORNEDBEAST / MARZURAAN split (Aurora Borealis) cd 10.00
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Every once in a while, someone will release a record, and we can't help but feel like it was made specifically for us. And for you. Some records just perfectly speak to the aQ aesthetic, as undefinable as that seems to be. This is another one of those cases. Someone thought it would be a perfect combination to match up UK one man ambient drone outfit Tenhornedbeast, with UK slow motion doomlords Marzuraan. And it is perfect. And a fantastic idea, but just because something is a great idea, doesn't always mean someone thinks of it. And we're not saying we had been thinking someone should get these two bands together specifically, we're just glad they did, and we sort of wish we HAD thought of it. But that's neither here nor there. The important thing is that it happened, and now we can all luxuriate in the deep dark heaviness both of these bands explore. And while the bands are indeed different, their aesthetics are not all that far removed. The both exist in some blackened nether region, haunting sonic realms, where heaviness can be expressed in both utter darkness and extreme force, sometimes both, and once in awhile neither.
Tenhornedbeast offer up a nearly 30 minute long sonic ritual, beginning as a bit of swirling black minimalism, but slowly building to a truly intense wall of doomdrone, the sound thick and textured, a churning cauldron of low end buzz and downtuned disembodied riffs, all brought to a boil and poured out in a viscous black torrent, left to flow like some subterranean river. But these deep drones are laced with melodies, and keening high end shards, allowed to shine forth occasionally, but often swallowed up before they can fill those caves with their unnatural light. The track continually changes shape, sound and timbre, various shades of grey and black, lightening and darkening as the landscape changes, a haunting journey through some lost world, where sound replaces sight, allowing us to navigate ever deeper.
Marzuraan counter with what must be one of their prettiest tracks ever. It's still sludgey and doomy, but the notes ring out, the melodies almost soar, the sound fuzzy and glimmering, almost like these guys have caught the shoegaze bug as well. Washed out and blissy, super melodic and melancholy, but the coolest part is that the track seems to warble and waver, almost like someone is manually adjusting the tape speed, so the notes sound drunken and drugged, the track lurches and weaves drunkenly, only adding to the haunting and off kilter beauty. Part way through, the riffs get a little more riffy, and then the vocals come in, a moaning distant croon, and we're most definitely in serious Jesu territory, but that weird speed shifting hitch, keeps it from sounding too pretty, or two blissy. But if these guys keep heading in this direction, they could definitely give Jesu, and Nadja and other metallic shoegazers a run for their money.
The packaging is super swank, a three panel gatefold, each of the front panels diecut with each band's symbol, printed inside and out, housed in a thick plastic sleeve with a sticker affixed to the front.
MPEG Stream: TENHORNEDBEAST "Law Of The Needle"
MPEG Stream: MARZURAAN "Into Countless Battles"

THE ONE I, MASTER (Total Holocaust) cd 8.00
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It's been almost 5 years since we last heard from Greek duo THE ONE, who back then, were maybe not a duo, and who were most definitely in our pantheon of weirdo black metal, along with Necrofrost, Abruptum and Vondur, vying for the top spot with their heavily reverbed blackness and insane vocals.
But here we are years later, and The One are not nearly as weird as they once were. Like Necrofrost, who have also resurfaced and whose new record is reviewed elsewhere on this list, it might not be that they are less weird, but that the weirdness is better integrated into their sound.
Before, the music was a stumbling chaotic blur, everything tangled up with everything else, the mix super erratic, with various elements exploding out of the mix, the drumming wild and off kilter, lots of grunts and some of the growliest monster vocals ever, and we'd be lying if we didn't say we weren't initially disappointed that this record was so GOOD. And tight. And solid. Cuz it is. Good. Really good. Heavy and black, the guitars intense and thick and full, some awesome riffing, the drums hard hitting and audible in the mix, the mix itself lush and LOUD, plenty of groove and hooks hidden here and there, but not damaged or demented or fucked up. At least at first. No one can make music that weird and then suddenly ditch all the various elements that made that music so strange. So here, on I, Master, the weird shit is subtle, and generally tucked away amidst thrashing blasting blackness and chugging riffage, whether it's an impossibly long and harsh hissy howl, or some weird dubbed out cymbal shimmer, or even a creepy circusy interlude with a looped music box groove and whispered vocals, the weird stuff is definitely there, but that's no longer why we're here, this is some heavy Ravenstormy Blizzard Beastly blown out buzz drenched heaviness, with just the right amount of crooning chanted vocals and midtempo doominess to keep it interesting, but they have definitely ditched their fucked up fractured past in favor of something ultimately way more pleasing, a super epic, ultra heavy, dense and destructive, blasting and buzzing black metal, and so far today, we've listened to the whole record all the way through THREE times, and the night is still young...
MPEG Stream: "I"
MPEG Stream: "III"

TIHEASALO, TOPIAS Eyes Of A Dead Lamb (Tyyfus) cd 10.00
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Is there no end to the wonderful musical mysteries Finland has to offer? We sure hope not. Whether it's demented black metal, crushing doom sludge, freaky forest folk, or shimmery pop, Finland never disappoints. And now you can add, ultra minimal outsider solo guitar to that list.
Topias Tiheasalo, who we know absolutely nothing about, and Google searches also reveal practically nothing, other than the fact that he is 29 years old, is less of a "guitarist" and more of a guitar explorer, a guitar experimentalist. Falling somewhere between the abstract scrabble of Derek Bailey and the moody minimalism of Loren Connors, Tiheasalo, crawls all over the guitar, spending as much time thumping the body, scraping the bridge, and coaxing all manner of buzz and rattle from his guitar as he does either picking or strumming. The opening track is a strange percussive soundscape, punctuated by an awesome deep reverberant buzz drenched throb, as well as some fragmented chunks of slide. While all around these almost-melodies, lurk tons of black space, and all manner or subtle shuffle and accidental squeaks and creaks. Later on, some deliberately stumbling strum becomes a harmonic drenched melody, lurching and stuttering along a very abstract path. Elsewhere the guitar is rubbed to create strange whispery ambience, notes are hurled violently from the guitar, left to flutter to the ground, where they are sprinkled with glistening flurries of harmonics. Lots of angularity and atonality, but their are bits of delicate beauty tucked amidst the twisted and convoluted guitarscapes.
A strange strange record. Not beautiful in any sort of typical way, but damaged and difficult and in that musical obstinance, quite lovely indeed. Fans of Bailey, Connors, Taku Sugimoto, Fabrice Eglin and of course Keith Rowe as well as other atypical six stringers will find much to explore and enjoy...
MPEG Stream: "4:14"
MPEG Stream: "5:22"
MPEG Stream: "3:17"

TRIST Initiation (Kunsthall) cd 10.00
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Not to be confused with the much more prolific Czech depressive doom-ed black metal Trist, German one man band Trist is the ambient drone side project of Benjamin Konig, who is also the frontman for Lunar Aurora, an amazing black metal band we love, but have yet to list here (which will be remedied as soon as possible, we promise).
Initiation comes via the same label that has been gradually re-releasing all the Paysage D'Hiver demos over the last couple years, and is a collection of various long out of print and even at the time barely available demos, recorded between 2000-2003. Nothing black metal here, but plenty blackness nonetheless, Trist explores slow, hazy, otherworldly ambience, black drones and delicate Lustmordian soundscapery, a sound that falls somewhere between the gauzy digitized smear of folks like Tim Hecker and Aidan Baker, and the abject electronics and post apocalyptic sonic sprawl of groups like Wolf Eyes and Emeralds, infusing it with that distinctive 'black metal intro' vibe. Not obviously synthy, and definitely not overly guitar based, the sound on Initiation is blurred and washed out, melodies exist but are only glimpsed fleetingly, the longform drones and extended drifts are heavily textured with, warm whooshing whir, distorted crumble, ethereal fields of hiss and click and pop and rough sandpaper like buzz, definitely very dreamy and moonlit, but also ominous and grim, very cinematic, evoking some alien wasteland, burnt and ruined beneath a smoke filled sky, something lurking in the shadows, the ground littered with death and destruction.
Folks who loved that Cities Last Broadcast from last list, will definitely dig this too, as it mines the same sort of wasted unpopulated barren planet vibe, and take the more abstract dronescaping of folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX and Xela and Aun and Svarte Greiner somewhere much more cinematic. Bits of new age seep in here and there, chunks of slow motion doomdrone now and again, mysterious loops and bits of glitch surface throughout, giving many of the tracks an avant turntablist vibe, like Strotter Inst or Jeck, this is certainly not what you might expect from a grim black metaller, instead Initiation plays out more as a dense and varied and layered work of tense instrumental minimalism, of gorgeous and harrowing experimental dronemusic, and of course bleak black ambience, maybe too abstract for metalheads, but folks into drone and doom and drift and all that cd-r floorcore rumble and shimmer would do well to grab one of these right quick.
MPEG Stream: "In Die Schwarze Nacht"
MPEG Stream: "Toter Raum"
MPEG Stream: "Kalt"

TROLLMANN AV ILDTOPPBERG Live At The Tyne (Monolith) dvd-r 6.00
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The time has come. Hard to believe. Trollman in the flesh. Live. Their mortal forms revealed to all. Thundarr and Mordraaneth. Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come, Cosmic Keys To Gates Unknown. All before our very eyes.
Not sure what we were expecting, so much of Trollmann was mystery, those strange drawings on the cds, the bizarre monickers, the lengthy song titles. And hell, the sound. Huge expanses of slow motion doom. Hellish drones spread out like a black fog. We were sort of expecting some sort of SUNNO))) thing. Dry ice, hoods, robes, back lit shadows. But nah, that's a little too contrived. Maybe they would be hidden behind some stones, or huge curtains. Or maybe they would be monsters, creatures of the night, exposed for the very first time, a horrific but impossibly compelling sight.
No matter how you slice it, with a mysterious band, it's hard not to be disappointed, and to be totally honest we were a little at first, but then, the whole thing became more and more surreal, and it was hard not to love these guys even more.
It starts with skeletal, taciturn looking long hair man in a long sleeve Burzum t-shirt, seated at a keyboard in front of a huge black tapestry of a long haired, mustachioed skull wearing an Indian headress above crossed swords. Beside him, stands another long haired fellow, in jeans and a black t-shirt, holding a black bass. All to the strains of a skull rattling low end doomdrone. But then the camera pulls back to reveal the fact that they seem to be outside, DURING THE DAY! They also seem to be under a bridge. Beneath a brick arch, with a muddy hillside in the background, trees and bushes. On the wall behind the band in the background a strange brass plaque, and what appears to be a pig's head on a stick. The whole thing is filmed with a super jittery camcorder, sudden unexpected zooms, face, fingers on strings, the dirt hillside in the background, the skull on the tapestry, and while the band plays, you can hear people talking, obviously not that into the band, one guy even comes to the front of the stage, beer in hand, and begins to taunt the band, making hand gestures and mugging fro the crowd. Someone in the audience yells "You're fucking SHITE!!!". People laugh, but the band remain expressionless, intent on the harsh soundworld they're weaving beneath this bridge.
The second track begins the same way, the taciturn man seated at his keyboard, beneath the Indian skull, but at this point, either the cameraman is getting bored, or has gotten too drunk to really keep the camera still or keep his attention on the band. Lots of jittery shots of the floor, the wall beside the band, the band members' feet, the crowd, drunk dudes and cute metal girls, amps, the trees behind the stage, the houses on the other side of the bridge, and most bizarrely of all, a couple of little dogs, one of whom proceeds to run back and forth in front of the stage, seemingly unperturbed by the roaring doomic dirge emanating from the speakers. And the cameraman seems unduly interested in the dog, considering he is meant to be capturing the slow motion might of Trollmann. Much more crowd chatter this time around, but somehow it just adds to the sound. Laughing and inane drunken conversations are inadvertently woven into the black fabric of Trollmann's sound. A bespectacled man mouths "Awesome. Fucking awesome... " Someone holds a cigarette beneath the camera letting the smoke whip by the lens like the world's most inexpensive special effect. All the while, Trollmann remain impassive, statue like, emitting an impossibly gorgeous ambient dirge, chanted vocals, over a pulsing bass drone and shimmery keyboards. Almost like Moss crossed with SUNNO))) only with Gregorian chant-like vocals. The whole thing is incredibly surreal, the camera bobbing from the ground to the sky to the band to the crowd and back again, the sky darkening behind the band, the crowd growing less and less distinct, and more like featureless shadows, wraiths... it's somehow sort of perfect.
Outside of the camera panning back to reveal a troll atop a toadstool clutching his keyboard, and a huge furry caveman with a club in one hand and a bass guitar in the other, performing on the edge of a fiery abyss, wreathed in clouds of vampire bats and thick curls of black smoke, we really couldn't have wished for more...

UP-TIGHT Live At The Lucrezia (Last Visible Dog) dvd 9.00
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First dvd release from both Up-Tight and Last Visible Dog, sees (or allows us to see) one of our favorite heavy Japanese psych trios kicking out the jams live in Tokyo. There's 52 minutes of footage here, the band performing four songs: "Day Dream Believer", "Cool Eyes", "Never Come Morning", and "Sweet Sister".
Musically Up-Tight are their usual dark and distorto-delic selves, some of this an amped up assault, some of it achingly beauty displaying their softer side, all in all a pretty awesome performance from them. And visually this is very cool too, the raw video having been given a psychedelic special FX treatment done tastefully enough to enhance, rather than distract from, the experience.
And no matter where you live, this all-regions dvd should be compatible with your TV, as it's double-sided, PAL on one, NTSC on the other.

V/A (Triskaidekaphobia) 13,000.00 Milliseconds (Ratskin Records) cd 4.00
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You know those Sublime Frequencies "Radio" compilations we love so much, the ones that just sound like someone sitting in a hotel room in another country flipping stations on the radio and recording the results. Well imagine a similar compilation, but in this case, the listener/recorder has an extreme case of ADD, and is flipping between some insane non existent all avant freaked out noise satellite radio station and all the strange little non-stations you discover when you're driving across the country, flipping through the dials at 4am. Little chunks of beautiful pastoral sound, bursts of ear gouging static, voices, snippets of speeches, some crazy guy testifying, some country or classical music that is just out of range so the sound  is all skittery and blurred, delicate swaths of soft plinked piano, blasts of grinding deathmetal, talk radio, skittery rhythms, lots of textures and timbres, noises and melodies, most often swallowed up before they can develop into anything more than a fragment, than a partially formed musical thought, but that's sort of the point. This comp will definitely enrapturously engorge the ears of aural adventurers and noise devotees, but just might rattle the nerves of those less prepared. Despite the incredibly lengthy list of incredibly eclectic artists who participated in this brand new compilation titled (Triskaidekaphobia) 13,000.00 Milliseconds:
Venetian Snares, Matmos, Thrones, MGR, I Am Spoonbender, Wildildlife, David Scott Stone (Melvins), Blevin Blectum, Winters In Osaka, Leslie Keffer, Microwaves, Sword Heaven, To Live And Shave In L.A., Wobbly, The White Mice, Skozey Fetish, Brad Laner, Rubber O Cement, Bobb Bruno, Cock ESP, Panicsville, Otto Von Schirach, Crank Sturgeon, Deletist, Drums Like Machineguns, Valerio Cosi, Eats Tapes, Evil Moisture, No Doctors, Two Dead Sluts, One Good Fuck, Leslie Keffer and about a million more....
The nature of 215+ 13-second compositions strung together non-stop without room to take a breath pretty much ensures that this cd will be catalogued in most libraries and music shops in the experimental/noise section. Unfortunate really, since while it definitely has its share of earwax-dislodging aggressive assaults, it also has quite a few shining moments of artful sound design and subtle songcraft that defy genre-fication. And somehow, the bits of noise, and the bits of prettier sound, do balance out, almost seeming to play off one another, or at the very least, slowly seep into each other, helping form what is ultimately a constantly shifting somewhat schizophrenic sonic whole. It's an overwhelming and intense listening experience, another one for the iron eared, or at least the adventure eared, and while we just listened to the whole thing all the way through, for the third or fourth time, for some folks it might work better in smaller chunks, because admittedly for some tracks the 13 seconds seems like an eternity, while others fly by all too swiftly. That said, we just started it over again from the top...
MPEG Stream: "1 (Different Dentist / Beta CLoud / To Live And SHave In L.A.)"
MPEG Stream: "2 (Migrations In Rust / Deep Fried Radio Static / Rubber O Cement)"
MPEG Stream: "3 (I Am Spoonbender / I Think I Did Something Wrong)"
MPEG Stream: "4 (Neon Leather Drip / Big Epoch Feat. Bizzart)"
MPEG Stream: "5 (Cheap Machines / Animal Hospital / Beneya Vs. Clark Nova)"

V/A Entering The Levitation: A Tribute To Skepticism (Foreshadow) 2cd 10.00
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In honor of the first new Skepticism record in 5 years, we figured we oughta relist this tribute to Skepticism, easily one of the best tribute albums we've heard in ages, some of the covers are just as good if not better (okay, maybe not better, but damn close) than the originals! Some of our favorite doom bands take on their masters, as well as a whole mess of new bands we hadn't heard until this here collection...
The world may be full of doom and gloom, and your shelves may be bursting at the seams will all manner of slow motion sludge and funereal dirges, but there was a time, when true doom wasn't so easy to come by, the world wasn't prepared for slow motion misery and abject musical miserablism, but we were, and we hunted and searched, and thus we discovered Finland's Skepticism. The heaviest, most beautiful, most perplexingly atmospheric music we had yet encountered. It was so washed out and dreamy it was barely metal. So slow and pretty it almost sounded choral. We described the music of Skepticism as sounding like sitting in a church, while a doom metal band practiced in the basement, the huge thudding crush, barely audible through the floor, the sounds intertwining with the warm whir of the church organ, some strangely spiritual sonic confluence, that was as magical as it was mysterious.
And it wasn't just us. The sound of Skepticism spoke to all sorts of people, metalheads, doomlords, drone freeks, weirdo music obsessives, and it made perfect sense, as it was all those things, metal, doom, drone, weird. Add to that, lovely, haunting, creepy, ominous and absolutely fucking brilliant.
So here we have a double disc tribute to the masters of slow motion doomed beauty, from a handful of bands, as with most comps, many we'd never heard of, a few we were already big fans of. And also with tributes, how do you pay tribute to a music that is already so perfect? Do you try to sound as much like it as possible, or change it into something else entirely? Somehow, all of the bands here have managed a little bit of both, enough that this is a gorgeous and epic funereal doom record all the way through. Pretty enough to appeal to folks who just like their music dark and dreamy, but heavy enough to mesmerize the blackest hearted of metalheads.
Right out of the gate, Nest (who we'd never heard of) offer up a 14 minute version of a track off the first Skepticism, and do their own sort of blissed out reverential dronedoom version which might be our favorite track on the comp. Stretches of lilting acoustic guitars over rumbling drones, separated by shimmering keyboards and slow plodding muted riffs, so soft it's barely metal at all, more a sort of droning slowcore. Much like the original, but even more soft and shimmery.
The rest of disc one, offer up more traditional doom versions of Skepticism classics, but each twisted and tweaked enough to be a good fresh listen. The final track on disc one, "The Organium" by Oktor, might be the weirdest, a sort of industrialized, mechanical stumbling doom lurch, with sung / spoken deep crooned vocals. Weird but super cool.
The highlight of disc two is of course Rigor Sardonicous, who we of course LOVE, and who do a killer version of "Chorale", beginning with backwards guitars, which eventually morph into a massive downtuned dirge, with that mournful melody buried in the mix, and the strangely loud cymbals we love so much (see some of our other RS reviews about that). The other groups on the second disc definitely take their liberties, Calmsite, turn their track into almost death metal, Aarni give Skepticism a folky makeover, and It Will Come, start out slow and sludgy, but then slip into some sort of drifting post rock slowcore. It's all pretty awesome. How bad could it be starting with Skepticism songs after all?! But either way, this is an awesome collection of intense and beautiful, slow sad heavy dooooooooom, that most definitely does Skepticism proud.
MPEG Stream: RIGOR SARDONICOUS "Chorale"
MPEG Stream: MONOLITHE "Edges"
MPEG Stream: SHROUD OF BEREAVEMENT "Forge"

V/A Phoning It In (West Main Development) cd 7.00
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Before we get going with this review, we figured we oughta just get your attention with the words NEW 30 MINUTE DANIEL HIGGS TRACK!!! That's right, we'll get to that in a minute though...
Phoning It In is a radio show in Boston, where musicians call in and perform songs over the phone, which makes for super intimate performances, but which also give the recordings a cool, alien, lo-fi vibe (remember the vocals-recorded-from-jail on Bad Brains' I Against I record?!). This disc collects three recent guests on Phoning It In, The Caribbean, Don Zientara and Mr. Daniel Higgs. The first three tracks are solo acoustic numbers from the frontman of The Caribbean, and are quite nice, falling somewhere between the Mountain Goats and some more traditionally indie. The vocals lilting and sadboy, the guitar minor key, the tracks simple but quite lovely. Don Zientara, a legendary producer (whose name has graced almost every DC punk record you've ever owned) as well as performer, and here offers up two haunting acoustic numbers, long drawn out steel string tangles, simple strumming and angular fingerpicking, a sort of Appalachia / indie jangle hybrid, with a high croon that is actually quite reminiscent of Charles Manson or Captain Beefheart. The whole thing sounding like some unearthed demo tape from Laurel Canyon in the late sixties / early seventies. 
Most folks are probably gonna buy this for the Higgs track, and it's well worth it, a massive sprawling buzzing distorted raga epic, 25 minutes, total blown out super distorted lo-fi trance inducing beauty. It sounds like a pump organ (and at times like a guitar, and at others a Jew's harp...), wheezing out thick dense chords, with notes overlapping and beating against each other, pulsing and buzzing, some ancient primitive ritual, timeless and divine, completely mesmerizing, like alien bagpipe music, a keening high end drone that twists and changes shape, various notes peeling off in little curlicues of feedback, or flurries of jagged scrape, but always being reabsorbed into this surprisingly lush organic rumbling buzzing divine drone. Absolutely amazing of course. 
Packaged in a cool hand printed cardstock sleeve, with a mini printed insert.
MPEG Stream: "Daniel Higgs"

VORDR s/t (Nykta) cd ep 5.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
The return of these Finnish freaks, and another awesome disc of blown out, ultra raw, ultra grim black metal buzz. Vordr may feature a member of aQ faves Circle Of Ouroborus, but as we mentioned in our review of the last Vordr, you won't find any stumbling folk, or abstract black ambience, or bizarre fractured WTF here, the domain of Vordr is reserved for tweeter destroying high end brittle lo-fi blast and pound, a swirling melee of chaotic skree drenched buzz, D-beat death pounding drums and sharp slivers of buzzing insectoid riffage, unfurling in long blurred streaks beneath anguished tortured wails and teeth gnashing demonic shrieks.
There is most definitely plenty of melody lurking below the surface, but those bits of melody are well protected, only the blackest of souls can withstand the constantly churning sea of fucked up sound that surrounds them, billious bursts of abject fury, in-the-red shards of buzz drenched rrroooaaar, festering gouts of sonic virulence, this is sick, ugly, gloriously noxious black grimnity, a series of musical ice picks to the inner ear, a tinnitus inducing swarm of beautiful blackness, which will most definitely warm the cold dead hearts of all who worship at the altars of Bone Awl, Ash Pool, Akitsa Vegas Martyrs and the like.
MPEG Stream: "Wild Of Glory"
MPEG Stream: "Legends In The Bark"
MPEG Stream: "Vitterlicht"

WALLACE, ZACH Glass Armonica (Root Strata) cd 8.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Zach Wallace is half of the group Sun Circle, whose s/t debut (first cd-r, then lp) we raved about a while back right here. Gorgeous, organic, ritualistic, raw and intimate dark and droning minimalism, one track was a dense thick drone constructed from just voices, the other a delicate drift of weightless tones distant chimes and hushed shimmer.
This solo disc from Wallace reminds us a bit of that second track, another soft focus swirl of ethereal sounds, and warm muted tones, although here, all of those tones are created on a home made glass armonica, hence the title. Wallace's glass armonica, is based on Benjamin Franklin's original design from 1761, but is made from thrift store wine glasses, and salvaged bits of lumber. The glasses are arranged by pitch, and Wallace's version of the armonica has been expanded for up to 12 players.
Most of us have played a glass, rubbed the edge of a partially filled water glass at dinner, and made a cool little sound. And while the concept is the same, the sound here is so much more expansive and lush, a symphony of microtones and overtones, the various notes and sounds, buzzy and metallic, warm and muted, pulsing and throbbing, intertwining, weaving in and out of mysterious melodies, hypnotic and otherworldly, sounding like insects one second, singing strings the next, the interactions creating strange subtle rhythms, the tones slipping in and out of warm whirring harmonies, sometimes tense and dramatic and almost dark, other times ephemeral and surprisingly melodic, the timbre and tone shifting subtly from thick and dense and powerful, to crystalline and barely there, all three tracks so lovely and so easy to lose yourself in.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Cool fold over cardstock sleeves, silver metallic screen printed with photocopied insert.
MPEG Stream: "19:07"
MPEG Stream: "27:16"

WITCH Local Band Nitemare (Tee Pee) dvd 9.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
The Witch album that came out last year was, in our doom-lovin' opinion, one of the best Black Sabbath/'70s styled doom metal records we'd heard in a long time. And quite a surprise, considering that Witch is something of an unlikely "supergroup" -- including members of new weird folksters Feathers, and Dinosaur Jr. mainman J. Mascis, on drums!! Of course, Mascis is super busy now with the (equally unlikely but totally awesome) Dinosaur reunion, we know that our hankering for new material (or live dates out here in California) from Witch was probably gonna require some patience on our part. Fortunately, to keep us tided over 'til whenever that happens, there's this unexpected DVD documentary on Witch! With the great title "Local Band Nitemare", it's about 20 minutes long, shot on tour in in the Northeast, 2007 including both live performance and interview footage... join Witch on the road, in the van, backstage, in the hotel. Hijinks ensue, sort of. Some of it is actually funny, maybe just 'cause it's J. Mascis there in his long grey hair and glasses... and the live bits will serve to remind you how this multigenerational band of longhairs are almighty masters of the swingin' doom RIFF, in the tradition of Sabbath, Saint Vitus, Sleep, Dead Meadow, and even the Flower Travellin' Band. Also included in addition to Local Band Nitemare: the psychedelic-visual-effects overloaded promo video for the track "Seer" (check out J. spinning those sticks!), a special full live rendition of "Isadora" from their very first show, and also an art/photo gallery feature. So, if you like Witch as much as we do, you'll be pretty stoked on this. If you haven't checked Witch out yet, well we urge you to pick up their self-titled debut if what we said about 'em above has interested you at all!
NB. the band originally released this themselves on dvd-r, wrapped in just a xeroxed paper sleeve, but this new version on Tee Pee is a real dvd, packaged in a normal dvd case, done up all pro-like.

----*
----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed :
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If you want to order one of these, just search for the item, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart!

AIR "Love 2" (Astralwerks) cd 16.98
ANTI-POP CONSORTIUM "Fluorescent Black" (Big Dada) cd 15.98
ARMAGEDDON "s/t" (Esoteric) cd 23.00
BARE WIRES "Let Down" (Milk 'n' Hepes Records) 7" 5.98
BARRACUDA, RANDY "s/t" (Flogsta Dancehall) lp 27.00
BASEMENT JAXX "Scars" (XL) cd 15.98
BIBLE OF THE DEVIL / BLADE OF THE RIPPER "split" (Scarey Records) 7" 5.98
BLACK HEART PROCESSION "Six" (Temporary Residence) cd 15.98
BLACK SABBATH "Master Of Reality" (Sanctuary) 2lp 29.00
BLIND BLAKE "Bahamian Songs" (Megaphone) cd 17.98
CALIFONE "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" (Dead Oceans) cd/2lp 14.98/17.98
CAVE, NICK & WARREN ELLIS "White Lunar" (Mute) 2cd 16.98
CELAN "Halo" (Exile On Mainstream) cd 14.98
CYMBALS EAT GUITARS "Why Are There Mountains" (Sister's Den) cd 13.98
DESTROYER 666 "Defiance" (Season Of Mist) cd 14.98
EARTH AND FIRE "s/t" (Esoteric) cd 23.00
ESPVALL, HELENA & MASAKI BATOH "Overloaded Ark" (Drag City) cd/lp 14.98/21.00
EVANGELISTA "Prince Of Truth" (Contellation) cd/lp+cd 16.98/25.00
FEELIES "Good Earth" (Bar None) cd 14.98
GERMAN MEASELS, THE "Wild" (Captured Tracks) 12" 14.98
GOES CUBE "Another Day Has Passed" (The End) cd 14.98
HELCARAXE "Broadsword" (Regimental) cd 14.98
HELDON "Allez Teia" (Wah Wah) lp + 7" 30.00
HELDON "Electronique Guerilla" (Wah Wah) lp + 7" 30.00
HIGGINS, GARY "Seconds" (Drag City) cd 14.98
HOOD, ROBERT "Minimal Nation" (M-Plant) 2cd 17.98
INCAPACITANTS "Lon Guy" (Harbinger) cd 14.98
JEFFERSON, BLIND LEMON "I Want To Be Like Jesus In My Head" (Monk) lp 22.00
KAITO "Trust" (Kompakt) cd 15.98
KARUNA KHYAL "Alomoni 1985" (Phoenix) cd 17.98
KLIMEK "Movies Is Magic" (Kompakt) cd 16.98
MELVINS / BRIAN WALSBY "Manchild 4" (Bifocal Media) comic book + cd 16.98
MUDHONEY "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge" (Sub Pop) lp 14.98
MUDHONEY "s/t" (Sub Pop) lp 14.98
MUDHONEY "Superfuzz Bigmuff" (Sub Pop) lp 12.98
NEW DAWN, THE "There's A New Dawn" (Jackpot) cd 16.98
NEW ORDER "Power, Corruption and Lies" (Rhino) lp 28.00
NIHILL "Grond" (Hyrda Head) cd 16.98
PORT O'BRIEN "Threadbare" (TBD Records) cd 12.98
PSYCHIC REALITY "Real / Chic" (s/r) cassette 7.98
RATTO, MIKA "Polkupyoralla Vuokkopenkereelle" (Ektro) cd 14.98
RAVEONETTES, THE "In And Out Of Control" (Vice) cd 14.98
STOKES, FRANK "Downtown Blues" (Monk) lp 22.00
STONE GARDEN "s/t" (Shadow Kingdom) cd 13.98
TRUNK, JONNY "Scrapbook" (Trunk) cd/lp 16.98/17.98
V/A "Bite Harder: The Music De Wolfe Studio Sampler Volume 2" (De Wolfe Music Library) cd/lp 17.98/17.98
V/A "D-Funk: Funk, Disco & Boogie Grooves From Germany 1972-2002" (Marina) cd
V/A "Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series" (Wergo) 3cd 53.00
V/A "Limits Of Control OST" (Lakeshore Records) cd 17.98
V/A "Live At The Smell" (Peanut Baby) dvd 16.98
V/A "Songs In The Key Of Z: Volume 1 & 2" (Cherry Red) 2cd 16.98
V/A "Thai Funk Zudrangma Vol.2" (Zrmr) cd 27.00
V/A "Tokyo Flashback 7" (P.S.F.) cd 22.00
V/A "Tumbele! Biguine, Afro & Latin Sounds From The French Caribbean, 1963-74" (Sound Way) cd 16.98
V/A "Warp 20 (Chosen)" (Warp) 2cd 22.00
V/A "Warp 20 (Recreated)" (Warp) 2cd 25.00
V/A "Ze 30: Records Story 1979-2009" (Strut) cd 15.98
V/A (CROOKERS) "I Love Techno 2009" (Lektro Luv) cd 17.98
VHS HEAD "Video Club" (Skam) cd 9.98
VOIVOD "Infini" (Relapse) cd 14.98
WARDRUNA "Runaljod - Gap Var Ginnunga" (Indie Recordings / Fimbullijod) cd 21.00
WHITE RAINBOW "Sky Drips Drifts" (States Rights) cd 7.98
WHITE WIZZARD "High Speed GTO" (Earache) cd/lp 14.98/17.98
YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS "Live At The Hurrah" (Get Back) lp 24.00

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Please place your order via our website.

[1] We will contact you to verify your order and let you know when it will be shipped. Please note that occasionally it may take a day or two for us to reply. We are not a faceless bunch of computers replying to your order -- we are human beings!

[2] If we are out of some of your items and we think we will get them within the same week, we can wait to ship. Or... If it's going to be more than a few days to complete your order, we will ship what we have and then will contact you as the remainders arrive.

[ note ] Due to the everchanging nature of the independent record business, we are not responsible for listed price changes (due to supplier price changes) and often cannot update our site fast enough to reflect these changes, but we will always try to let you know of any differences.


DOMESTIC SHIPPING :
--------------------------------

1-2 items    $5.00 USPS Priority Mail
3+ items    $7.50 UPS Ground

Further Explanation (Please Read!):
Within the USA, an order of 3 or more items will be shipped via UPS ground for a flat fee of $7.50. These packages are automatically insured and trackable.

However, if your package contains just 1 or 2 items, we will ship your order via USPS Priority Mail, and charge you $5.00 for shipping. These packages are NOT insured or trackable, sorry. So if you desire those safeguards, please request UPS delivery at the $7.50 rate. You must mention this in the comments field of our online order form.

Also, please note that UPS will not ship to PO Boxes. If you only have a PO Box, we can ship packages of 3+ items via US Postal Service at the $7.50 rate. Special shipping needs (e.g. UPS Next Day) are also do-able, just ask.

Another important note: box sets DON'T (usually) count as one item. Sorry. A box set will generally bump you up into the "three or more items" category. Y'know, they're big. Boxes.


INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING :
-------------------------------- For foreign customers we ship via US AIRMAIL ("First Class International"). Your price is based on the actual cost of shipping plus $1. You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package" category and see the price for "First Class International". 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound.)

We highly recommend insurance for your international package, but it is very expensive! You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package" category and see the price for "Priority Mail International". 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound. 1 lp is usually a little over 1.5 pounds.)


INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE :
-------------------------------- You are hereby forewarned that Aquarius is not responsible if your international package gets lost in the mail. Insurance is your only recourse if your records never show up. Since the terrible events of 9/11, mail service has been slow and undependable... and while we haven't experienced any *confirmed* permanently lost mail, insurance might provide some additional piece of mind in this time of upheaval. We strongly recommend it. But yes, it is very expensive. It's your choice. Again: Aquarius is not responsible for lost mail, so if you aren't willing to take a (slight but real) risk, please buy the insurance.

International insurance is very expensive! In fact often the insurance costs more than the value of your package, in which case it obviously does not make sense to insure it. You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package" category and see the price for "Priority Mail International", which is the way insured packages are sent. 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound. 1 lp is usually a little over 1.5 pounds.)

For example: for a one-pound package worth $18 going to England, shipping without insurance is about $11.00. But with insurance, the shipping / insurance total is over $26.00!

It is your reponsibility to check the international rate calculator in order to determine whether or not you want international insurance. If you tell us you want international insurance, we will add it to your order no matter how much it costs!


PAYMENT :
-------------------------------- We accept the following credit cards: Visa, MC, Discover, and Amex. We will not charge your credit card until your order is ready to ship.

Money orders are accepted, but only in $USD. International customers please note that they must be international postal money orders purchased at a post office. Additional processing fees may apply. 

If you wish to pay by money order, you must confirm the order with us through email or phone BEFORE you send any payment. It's best to just use the secure order form on the website, and when checking out mark money order as your payment choice. We will then process your order and respond with all the crucial payment info.

We also accept payment by Paypal. If you opt for this payment method, we will send you a paypal total and payment instructions as soon as we've confirmed your order with you. Please do not send payment until you have received human contact from our mailorder department.

Unfortunately, we cannot take personal checks for mailorder, sorry!


QUESTION?
-------------------------------- Email the mailorder department: mailorder@aquariusrecords.org
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SOME SELECTED UPCOMING RELEASES

----} October 13th or sooner even
Flaming Lips "Embryonic" cd on Warner Brothers
Lightning Bolt "Earthly Delight" cd/2lp on Load
Baroness "Blue Record" cd/lp on Relapse
Skeletonwitch "Breathing The Fire" cd/lp on Prosthetic
Melvins / Brian Walsby "Manchild 4: Pick Your Battles" book+cd
MV & EE "Barn Nova" cd on Ecstatic Peace
Tinariwen "Imidiwan: Companions" 2cd on World Village USA
King Crimson "Red" cd reissue on Discipline

----} October 20th
Shrinebuilder "s/t" on Neurot
White Rainbow "New Clouds" cd on Kranky
Richard Youngs "Under Stellar Stream" cd on Jagjaguwar
Spiral Stairs "Real Feel" cd on Matador
OOIOO "Armonico Hewa" cd on Thrill Jockey
Little Dragon "Machine Dreams" cd/lp

----} October 27th
Group Doueh "Treeg Salaam" cd version on Sublime Frequencies
Group Bombino "Guitars From Agadez Vol.2" cd version on Sublime Frequencies
Gorgoroth "Quantos Possunt Ad Santanitatem Trahunt" cd on Regain
Saviours "Accelerated Living" cd/lp on Tee Pee
Broadcast "Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate" cd on Warp
Eagle Twin "The Unkindness of Crows" lp version on Southern Lord
Cobra Killer "Uppers & Downers" cd
Wolfmother "Cosmic Egg" cd
Tia Carrera "Quintessential" cd on Small Stone
Tegan & Sara "Sainthood" cd on Sire

----} November 3rd
Cold Cave "Love Comes Close" cd/lp reissued via Matador

----} also upcoming sooner or later or sooner or later
Six Finger Satellite "A Good Year For Hardness" cd on Anchor Brain
Shit And Shine "229 2299 Girls Against Shit" lp on Riot Season
Ocean "Pantheon Of The Lesser" 2lp version on Important
Bunkur "Nullify" cd on Displeased
Grumbling Fur (Guapo + Jussi from Circle) cd
Combat Astronomy "Earth Divided by Zero" cd
Rosetta "Wake/Lift" vinyl version
Anton Batagov "Passionate Desire To Be An Angel" cd on Long Arms Records
Japancakes "If I Could See Dallas"
Sean Smith "Eternal" cd on Ultra Hard Gel
Jazzfinger "The Sun's Golden Blood" cd on Beta-Lactam Ring
v/a "Noise Room" cd on Soniq
Country Teasers / Ezee Tiger split lp on Holy Mountain
Erase Errata TBA cd on Kill Rock Stars
Xiu Xiu TBA cd on Kill Rock Stars
The Black Heart Procession TBA cd/lp on Touch And Go
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists TBA cd/lp on Touch And Go
Rodan TBA cd/lp on Quarterstick
Deftones "Eros" cd on Warner Bros.
Swell Maps "International Rescue" clear vinyl LP reissue on Alive
Black Lips "We Didn't Know..." green vinyl LP on Bomp!
Loss "Despond" cd on Profound Lore
Celestiial "Where Life Springs Eternal" cd on Bindrune
Blood Of The Black Owl "A Banishing Ritual" cd on Bindrune


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Lots of love from your devoted AQ staff

Andee Cup Jim AllanIrwinScottNickSallyJonandAndrew